The Fantastic Tale Of The Girl Who Waited
by theshypen
Summary: After Canary Wharf and Bad Wolf Bay, a bride suddenly appears in the TARDIS. Her name is Amy Pond and she already knows the Doctor... But he doesn't know her. Now, instead of becoming a brooding space hermit as planned, the Doctor must jump across timelines to try and piece together the wibbly wobbly puzzle of the girl who waited for him. AmyTen romance if you really want it to be.
1. The Bride And The Groom

**_Hello there. If you have ever played with the thought of the Tenth Doctor traveling with Amy Pond, I hope this will be to your liking._**

_Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, Amy Pond, Rory Williams or Leadworth. A cottage in Leadworth would probably be lovely though._

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1 – The Bride And The Groom

The TARDIS had never felt so empty before. The Doctor looked around, blinked, took a couple of mindless steps towards the console. Something wet trickled down his cheek and he quickly brushed the tear away with a sleeve. Tears, actually, since there were several. Funny, he didn't cry often, if ever at all.

No, there was nothing funny about this. What had he imagined? That after months of searching, wiring, boosting and patience to find the crack in space, reach through it and wait for her to find him, things would go back to normal? Things could never go back to normal now. Rose Tyler was trapped in a parallel universe with no means of escape. Not that she needed him anyways; despite what she said, he knew she had a shot at a normal life there. As normal as a human life would get.

But for the Doctor, there wasn't even a normal to go back to. Even before he went traveling with Rose for two years, things had not been normal. He had been on his own, alone against the universe after the war. And before the war… Well, there had never really been a normal state for him back then either. So the Doctor had nothing to rely on now when he found himself having said good bye to the light of his life. The simple human being who showed him that she was so much more, that he could feel and think so much more than he ever thought possible.

With a quiet sniff, he slowly walked around the TARDIS console. Better move away from the supernova. He had used all the energy he needed. All the energy he could. So where would he go now? He could go anywhere. With anybody.

At that thought, he nearly snickered at himself. No, not with anybody. With nobody. Rose was the last in a long line of travelers on the TARDIS who had ultimately had their fates ruined by the Doctor's doings. He had been wrong to pick up another companion after the Time War. As much as he wanted to hope that their time together had made a difference in the universe, as much as evidence of their adventures together practically told him so, the Doctor at this point wished that he had never gone back to ask her a second time if she wanted to come, those years ago. She would be better off if he had never dragged her away from her real life.

And so, the Doctor decided that lonely was his role in this world. The last of the Time Lords would observe and not intervene. There was no point anymore anyways. There was no point in anything. He closed his eyes.

The most surprising noises made him open them again. A quick gasp and a couple of footsteps. Raising a shocked eyebrow, the Doctor started moving around the console with anticipation. There was someone on the other side. Judging from the footsteps, this someone was also moving around the console at the same pace he was. But before he could think about changing his course, the other person did that exact thing.

Standing before him on the grating, with one shivering hand on the console, was a pale, tall, thin woman with round, green eyes. She was dressed all in white, a strapless dress that somehow managed to look like a summer's day and a cake at the same time. But what caught the Doctor's gaze more than anything was the wavy red hair flowing like a glowing mantle from her head, garnished with a pearly tiara and a pulled back veil. He thought he had never seen such ginger hair ever before in his lives. Just before he came back to his senses about this atrocity of a stranger appearing on the TARDIS out of nowhere, he couldn't help but feeling the ever so slight sting of jealousy.

Then, the woman broke the silence.

"What?" she spat out, the look on her face one of disgust – or disbelief, it was hard to place without knowing her.

"What?" the Doctor replied, more in disbelief than disgust since he didn't really know what there would be to feel disgusted about here.

"What did you do?" the woman practically screamed, emphasizing each word as she took several steps in his direction.

The Doctor winced and backed the same amount of steps.

"I didn't do anything!"

"Oh, come on, you always do something! Listen up, space elf, if this is your idea of a grand reunion, your head needs to be chopped off and screwed back on the right way!"

She had closed in even more by now, cornering the Doctor against the TARDIS' jumpseat. He only blinked and stuttered something unintelligible in reply. For the first time in ages, someone had managed to render him completely speechless. He had absolutely no clue about what was going on, and he was supposed to be one of the most intelligent lower-dimensional species in the universe.

The redhead finally took a deep breath and gave him some space. But her angry stare didn't leave him.

"Seriously though. You couldn't have just come to the reception, could you? That's not alien enough for you?"

"Reception of what?" the Doctor dared asking but literally jumped up to his feet as she slid down onto the jumpsuit, arms crossed.

She raised her eyebrows skeptically. "Of my wedding?"

"Oh…" the Doctor said, suddenly seeing the light. "You're in a wedding dress!"

The woman just glared at him with another look of disbelief. This one, however, wore blatantly clear specks of disgust.

"I don't believe you."

"What? I haven't even said anything you could not believe yet!"

"You didn't know it was my wedding today?" the woman asked in a calmer tone, but the Doctor sensed a storm brewing underneath the surface.

"How would I know that?" he questioned back, not able to help his frustrated tone.

"Because… I thought you cared? But maybe you… Maybe you actually forgot about me."

"Certainly seems so!"

"Certainly does."

The Doctor shook his head and sighed, but then noticed that her anger suddenly seemed to have gone. Her green eyes were staring into the distance somewhere, and they looked… sad? Oh, did he really have to deal with this now? Moments after saying good bye to Rose… He swallowed hard. He had said to himself that he wouldn't intervene anymore. And just then, something intervenes with him. It just wasn't fair, this universe should be grateful enough for all he had done already.

But he couldn't ignore a sad person. Especially not when she was sitting in his ship without an invitation.

"How did you get on board?" he asked, genuinely wondering. He started to race around the console, pulling levers and checking signals. "I don't understand, and I understand everything! This can't happen, there's no way a human being can lock onto the TARDIS and transport itself inside… Uh, you are human, by the way?"

He realized that he had only assumed since he had just spoken to Rose, but couldn't really be sure. What with the TARDIS being all over time and space and there being plenty of humanoid creatures sharing resemblance with the human species.

The woman nodded but remained silent. The Doctor nodded back and dug up an instrument from a toolbelt that was hanging from the console.

"It must be… Some sort of subatomic connection, something in the temporal field…" he started to ramble as he zoomed in on the human and began to examine her. "Maybe something macrobinding your DNA to the interior-"

"Doctor?" the woman said softly and moved away his hand which had been holding an instrument close to her right eye. "I was walking up the aisle. I was getting married."

"Yeah, but… Hang on." He dropped his jaw when he realized what she had just called him.

"I thought I was meant to. And meant to forget about you. And then the TARDIS sucks me in-"

"You know who I am?" he interrupted her and grabbed both her arms.

She jerked free of his grasp. "What are you playing at… Oh."

She had spotted something. Quickly walking past him, she grabbed something that was hanging from the railing. Strangely enough, it took the Doctor several seconds to register what the redhead was holding up. A blue shirt.

"Who's this?" she asked him in a peculiar tone.

He only replied with a grim look. It was Rose's blue shirt. The very same one she had worn when they had first visited New Earth. He hadn't even noticed that it was tossed over the railing. So absorbed had he been with the work of trying to contact her over these past months, that he hadn't even bothered to clean up the mess she had left here and there around the TARDIS. Naturally, the TARDIS would clean it up by herself eventually. She usually did… But she had not touched this shirt, for some reason.

"Where is she?"

"She's gone," he said simply.

"Gone? Already?" came the redhead's strange reply. "For how long did you travel with her?"

The Doctor swallowed. The thoughts he had had before this unnatural encounter boiled up within him again.

"Years," he snapped, stepping up and snatching the shirt from the woman's hands. "Where on Earth were you from?"

"So you met someone… And she left you."

The Doctor didn't look up. "Where's your home? Your wedding?"

When she didn't respond for a long time, he finally glanced up, only to see her anger returned, her mouth a thin line.

"Leadworth, England. Since you forgot."

When the TARDIS landed in the lush garden of a big house in Leadworth, England, the ginger bride hardly even waited for the police box to finish materializing before she marched out into the afternoon sunlight. The Doctor gingerly followed her and watched her come to an abrupt stop halfway up to the house. Cheerful voices and music could be heard, probably coming from the back garden or a room on the other side of the house with doors or windows open.

"They are having my reception without me," she said, voice vibrating with anger brewing anew.

"Can't blame them," the Doctor said, leaning against the TARDIS with arms crossed. "When humans aren't busy complaining about their own lives, they snatch up every chance to forget about it for a while."

That wasn't really how he did regard humans though. Humans were wonderfully compassionate and passionate most of the time, qualities he deeply admired. But at this current time, he really preferred to not tempt himself to stick around. The woman turned to look darkly at him.

"Are you seriously not even coming to the reception?"

"Why? How can you be angry about that?" the Doctor asked and threw his arms out. Before she could retort, he continued: "Believe me, I shouldn't be anywhere near human festivities. Or humans at all. Or Earth, even!"

"So why the hell are you here?"

The woman yelled even louder than before at him, and her whole being seemed to be shaking by now. The Doctor really couldn't understand her. Apparently they had met before and she was really angry for him not remembering it. He had searched his memories thoroughly, but even though he was such a highly intelligent and perceptive creature, he assumed that even he could not remember ever single person he had ever met. He had just been alive for too long.

"You came into my TARDIS. I had to get you home! I couldn't just have let you tag along, now, could I?"

That seemed to be too much for the woman. She opened and closed her mouth several times but didn't seem to figure out what to say. So she just sort of gasped before she tore her eyes away from him and finally stormed up to the house, slamming the front door shut behind her. Leaving the Doctor standing dumbstruck in the garden with a growing sense of irritation.

He growled at the oddity of the whole situation but went back inside his ship. But as he rounded the console board, starting to pull the levers and press the buttons required for taking off… His mind caught up with his emotions. The mystery still remained – how ever had that bride appeared inside his TARDIS? She certainly didn't seem to know. She was just an ordinary human. Or perhaps not as ordinary as he had assumed? Maybe he actually had met her before, during some strange event where she had seen him and been affected by something that could cause her to…

No, nothing he could think of could possibly make it possible to just 'beam up' to the TARDIS like that. Not for a human, at least. And absolutely not from Earth when he was orbiting a supernova in outer space. It just didn't make any sense, and it was driving him mad. Even more than she was.

Sighing, he patted the TARDIS.

"Alright. I will investigate this mystery, this one more mystery on Earth. But after that, I'm done. Done with humans, done with getting to know people." He flung out his arms in an open gesture, looking up at the time rotor. "After this, I will be a space hermit!"

A few minutes later, appropriately dressed in a tux, the future space hermit rang the bell on the front door of the Leadworth house. It was only a moment before someone opened. The Doctor came face to face with a tall, thin, young man, not too unlike himself actually. Except that this man's hair was rather blonde instead of brown, his eyes were blue instead of brown and he was wearing a gray tailcoat instead of a black tuxedo. Also, his nose was rather big.

"Hello!" the Doctor said cheerfully.

The man just stared blankly at him for several seconds.

"I'm a friend of the bride," the Doctor elaborated carefully.

"I know," the man said. "You're the Doctor."

"Oh, she mentioned me! Great!"

The man kept staring at him and swallowed a few times before he spoke again. "Did you kidnap her?"

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Earlier, in the church. She just disappeared, in golden sparkles. I mean, I know she's seen a few things in her life, but that was just a bit too weird. Spooked me out."

"Oh. No, no, that wasn't me. Well, she did end up on my ship. But it wasn't my doing, I swear!" The Doctor suddenly realized something and leaned his head to the side with a curious look. "You're the groom, aren't you?"

"Yes," the man said with a sort of nervous laughter. "Who would have thought that, eh? That I would be the man she settled for. After… You know. Everything she did and dreamed and…"

"Well, congratulations to you!" the Doctor beamed, seemingly surprising the fellow in the doorway. "What's your name again?"

"Rory," the man replied with a raised eyebrow. "Rory Williams? Do I really look that much different?"

At that, the Doctor grimaced. "I'm afraid I'm very bad with faces today. And names. Sorry 'bout that. Now, uh, I would like to see your wife again actually. It's kind of important."

He walked past Rory Williams into the hallway of the house.

"She's not here," Rory said behind him though, making him stop and spin back around.

"What do you mean she's not here? It's her reception and I just dropped her off!"

"Yeah, she… She came in and was upset." Rory sighed, scratching his head. "With you. And us. And then she took my car and went."

"Went where?" the Doctor asked.

"To where she always goes when she's upset."

"And where's that?"

Rory looked strangely at him, as if with sympathy. "You would have known if you hadn't left her."

This just kept getting more and more annoying for the Doctor, because as he was conversing, his mind was still working in the background, digging through nearly lost memories for any trace of the faces he had been presented with in the last hour. Yet, to no avail.

"Just tell me where?" he grunted impatiently.

"The hospital," Rory shrugged.

"Right! Come on, then!"

Surprising the groom again, he suddenly grabbed the man's hand and pulled him out into the garden. The front door was left wide open.

"But she took my car!"

"Nevermind that, I don't have a driver's license anyways," the Doctor laughed as they ran around a hedge and came to stop in front of the blue police phone box.

"Oh my god," Rory breathed, still holding the Doctor's hand without thinking about it. "It's the TARDIS!"

"She mentioned that too?" the Doctor said, almost impressed with his apparent fame.

"Mentioned?" Rory exclaimed, but didn't continue, nor take his eyes off the blueness.

"Good, then! I don't really have a driver's license for this either, but don't worry about that," the Doctor mumbled as he finally released the man's hand and rushed inside.

Rory looked like the Time Lord letting go of him felt like losing a life line. "Can I really come inside?" he asked.

"Not if you don't move your feet," the Doctor sighed, peeking out through the door with irritation. "You're the one who knows where this hospital is. I need you, because I need to get to your wife. Capice?"

"She's not…" Rory began, but then took a deep breath and stepped up to the doors.

As he looked inside, he really dropped his jaw. The Doctor saw his reaction and couldn't help but smiling smugly. Admittedly, this was one thing he was going to miss with humans. They were always so incredibly impressed with his ship.

Rory Williams finally took his very first steps inside the TARDIS and tried his best not to fall over from whatever emotions were stirring inside of him.

"She's not my wife yet," was all he managed to whisper.


	2. The Judoon Platoon Upon The Moon

_**Wow, favs and followers. That's truly nice, thank you. I will try to update at least once or twice a week. Hopefully that will satisfy your needs.**_

_Disclaimer: I don't own the Judoon, thankfully. Nor the Doctor, Martha or Amy, sadly._

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**2 –The Judoon Platoon Upon the Moon**

The hospital on the outskirts of Leadworth wasn't too big. The TARDIS landed right on top of a poor shrubbery in the front yard, and within seconds popped the Doctor and Rory Williams out, the latter which instantly ruined another perfectly good little shrubbery with his unknowing feet. The Doctor, however, navigated around the remaining decorative plants nimbly until he reached the asphalt roundel in front of the hospital's main entrance.

"Doctor…" Rory began faintly as he followed the alien somewhat less graciously.

"Now, I need to locate her and make her understand that I did not make her disappear from the church and appear in the TARDIS," the Doctor said promptly, ignoring the human. "I need her to understand that, and then I need to figure out who _did_."

"But there's-"

"Listen, I'm really sorry about your wedding and I'm grateful for you pointing out where the hospital were – how come she's going to a hospital when she's upset by the way? Seems an odd place to cheer up in, doesn't it?"

"Well-"

"Anyways, no time to lose. I don't want to involve more people than necessary, I'm afraid I've become a bit of an antisocial guy lately. Or so I wish. So just hang tight here, watch the TARDIS for me, will you? Be back with the missus in a split!"

And with that, the Doctor leaped up the steps to the entrance and disappeared inside the hospital, leaving Rory standing in the roundel with his mouth open. He was looking up into the sky.

Above the hospital – only over the main building and nowhere else – hung a very black raincloud. Thunders were just starting to rumble and heavy rain began to fall, making Rory back away until his back hit the TARDIS wall, his feet destroying yet another bunch of flowers in the process. The TARDIS was perfectly dry. The rain didn't fall here. Actually, it didn't really seem to quite fall at all.

"Doctor…" Rory mumbled again. "Is it raining upwards?"

Inside the hospital, the Doctor zoomed around, trying to get his bearings among the coughing and moaning patients and rushing doctors. He found it strangely funny to be surrounded by other doctors. He probably knew a lot more than all of them put together about any subject they could conjure. The thought made him feel gleefully confident.

As he passed by a window, he stumbled and did a double take. Since when was it raining outside? And since when… did rain behave like that?

That's when the whole building began to shake violently. Apparatus slid off the shelves, people fell over and screamed, the Doctor grabbed a doorknob and held on for dear life as an intense light pierced the corridors and made everyone – the Time Lord included – momentarily blinded.

In another room, two floors up, a woman was getting back up to her feet slowly and warily. She was still wearing her wedding dress, but a doctor's coat was flung over it and her red hair was put up into a casual bun, the tiara and veil having been discarded somewhere in a locker. Her colleague, a young dark skinned girl, sat huddled in a corner, not quite daring to move yet.

"Are you alright?" the bride asked the frightened girl, but didn't look straight at her. She kept her gaze on what was on the other side of the window.

"I think so, yeah," the dark girl replied, panting slightly. "It felt like an earthquake or-"

"It's gone dark," the redhead breathed.

"Dark? Outside? Is it the storm?" the dark girl asked, crawling up to look out the window as well. What she saw made her gasp.

"No, it's not the storm, Martha," the bride said and put a hand against the glass. It felt cool against her skin. "We're on the moon."

The view outside would have been spectacular if they had been astronauts, equipped for dealing with the situation and actually finding themselves in it purposefully. But they were no astronauts – they were medical students at the Leadworth hospital, only the hospital was no longer in Leadworth. It was indeed standing on the bloody moon.

And back in Leadworth on Earth in the afternoon sunlight, Rory Williams had never been so shocked in his entire life. There was just a hole in the ground where had seconds earlier been a big building. And the Doctor and his own fiancée had disappeared with it.

"What do we do?" Martha asked, not really calmed by the screams that leaked from the corridors into the lunchroom where they were standing.

The bride in the doctor's coat clenched her fists. "We deal with it," she said.

Exiting the room, the two medical students realized that the situation might already have gotten out of hand. If the moon wasn't enough to begin with, of course. Patients and nurses alike were panicking.

"Alright everyone!" the redhead shouted as she moved with determination through the corridor. "Back to bed! We've got an emergency but we'll sort it out. Don't worry!"

Martha ran after her and tried to give reassuring smiles to the people who stopped screaming for a moment. When they came to the end of the corridor, there was a bigger space for some beds with big windows on the wall. The realistic panorama that was displayed there once again surprised them.

"It's real!" Martha exclaimed, shaking her head. "It's really real!"

"Probably. I've seen stranger things turning out to be real, frankly," the ginger bride agreed and tilted her head as if thinking about something. "Hold on."

She reached up to grab the handle on a window.

"Wait!" Martha exclaimed.

"Oh, think about it. They're not exactly airtight," the bride said with a meaningful look at her colleague.

"Oh… Right. If the air would have gotten sucked out, it would have happened immediately."

"Exactly. But it didn't. And that means that something is stopping it from doing so – or someone."

"Very good point!" another voice exclaimed through the now somewhat calmer chaos behind the two.

Both students spun around to see a man walk towards them. Martha raised an eyebrow at the sight, but the redhead's face went from serious to shocked to almost faintly smiling.

"Brilliant actually," the Doctor said with an approving nod in the latter's direction. "What was your name again?"

"Amy Pond," she replied, but the traces of a smile disappeared the instant his question fell. He noticed, but didn't decide to bother with it at this time.

"Amy Pond! Wonderful name," he said instead and marched up to the window to take a careful look outside. "So Amy, what have we got? Is there a balcony on this floor, or a veranda or something?"

"By the patient's lounge, yeah," she said.

The Doctor turned to look her in the eyes. "Fancy going out, then?"

She looked back without wavering. "Any time."

"We might die."

"We might not."

Martha looked from one to the other in the strange mental battle that seemed to be going on.

"Good," the Doctor finally said, letting on a little involuntary smile. "Come on!"

"Amy?" Martha piped as the other two started to move away.

"Make sure people are alright," Amy told her, taking her hand in hers.

Martha nodded and they split ways in the corridor as Amy followed the energetic Doctor towards the balcony. When they got there, they stopped for a brief moment to just look. The balcony seemed as peaceful as ever, a relatively large area sticking out from the second floor. It could have been moonlight shining down upon it on a beautiful night. As it were, it was the faint Earthlight instead.

The Doctor touched one of the doors that were supposed to swing outwards and gave Amy a dramatic look. She merely sighed and moved past him to push the doors open herself. Very undramatically, which made the Doctor a bit disappointed.

Indeed, nothing dramatic happened. The two moved silently out to the edge of the balcony, watching the Earth so far away above them.

"We've got air," Amy stated.

"Just be glad for that," the Doctor nodded.

"Must be an artificial air pocket, held together by a force field of some kind," Amy continued, making the Doctor blink and wince slightly.

She bent down to pick up an empty can of soda that somebody had left out there, and tossed it as hard as she could out into the moon's landscape. It didn't fly for many meters until it went through something gleaming, previously invisible in the air and floated less quickly down to the ground on the other side, leading an eerie vibrating sound back to their ears.

"Seems I'm right," Amy said contentedly. "Which isn't really comforting though, since that could mean that the air will run out eventually."

"How do you…?"

"Know about that stuff? Easy. I've been around, you know. Or, you should know."

The Doctor's eyes narrowed as he studied her further. She was gazing out at the shining Earth, and for a moment the Doctor thought he saw a softness break through her strong outer shell. She wasn't really like this, he was sure. There was something more to her. Something deep down…

"Never quite like this though. But, if we can travel to the moon, we can travel back. Just gotta figure out who's behind this and gently persuade them to undo it. Right?"

"Right," the Doctor said quietly.

She finally turned to look at him, almost shyly, as if she couldn't stand him watching her any longer without acknowledging that, because she had obviously been aware of him doing it. And that's when it clicked for the Doctor.

"The way you were talking aboard the TARDIS… And Rory said you had met me before."

"Did he now?" Amy said dryly. "Funny, why would he say something like that?"

The Doctor's eyes widened. "Because you have, haven't you! But I haven't met-"

A thundering roar interrupted him, making the whole building shake anew. Two large spaceships, shaped almost like colons, flew over the hospital and landed a few hundred meters away in the dust of the moon.

"And here we are," Amy said grimly as they watched gates on the colon starships open up. One long line of humanoids marched out from each of them.

"Aliens!" they heard a voice exclaim behind them. It was Martha, having dared to scooch out to the balcony after the others. "Real, proper aliens!"

"Judoon," the other two said in choir.

The Doctor turned to look at Amy just as she raised an eyebrow back at him. So she knew some alien races and had the basic adventurer's sense of investigation and strategy. If she was from his future, which it became more and more obvious to him that she was, would she become another companion on the TARDIS? Despite him having sworn to stay away from humans after losing his last friend…

"This is where things get interesting, yeah?" Amy said.

"Interesting perhaps. Pleasant, probably not," the Doctor said dreadfully, but then smiled reassuringly to Martha with a pat on her shoulder as he and Amy moved past her back inside the hospital.

Martha Jones moved up to the railing and looked down as the Judoon lines closed in on the building, moving through the force field with ease. She shuddered but then looked up at the Earth, visible like an unusually colorful moon above the gray and black horizon.

"At least… It's very beautiful," she whispered to herself.

The Doctor and Amy Pond reached the ground floor and ducked behind a corner when they saw that the Judoon were already in the entrance hall. The aliens were doing their best to line up the screaming humans and scan them with some sort of instrument before stating their race with a guttural sound and marking the hands of the people with crosses.

"Are they… Cataloguing them?" Amy asked with disdain.

"There's not a little shop in the entrance hall?" the Doctor asked, also with disdain. "I like the little shops!"

Amy poked him in the ribs with an elbow, a move the Doctor couldn't help but fear might become more familiar to him in some future.

"Focus!" she hissed. "I know that the Judoon are some sort of ugly space police thugs. But what could they possibly be looking for in Leadworth?"

"Well…"

"You didn't do something bad, did you?"

"I would never! It's not me they're after, can't be. Unless I did something really bad here in my future and their past."

Amy gave him a confused look.

"Time. Gets wibbly-wobbly," the Doctor said with a waving gesture.

"But whatever they are looking for – why bring us to the moon?" Amy wondered, leaning against the wall out of sight from the rhino-like creatures.

"Neutral territory," the Doctor answered immediately, still leaning out from the corner, spying on the entrance hall. "According to intergalactic law, they've got no jurisdiction over the Earth. So they isolated the place. The whole hospital, where they probably think the suspect is at."

"By… An upside down storm?"

"Yes! It's called an H2O scoop! Anyways, if they are making a catalogue, that means they're after something non-human. Which is very bad news for me…"

"You sure you didn't-"

"Can't be sure, but probably not," the Doctor said and leaned back in to stand beside her, scratching his head. "Like I said, wibbly-wobbly."

"Timey-wimey," Amy Pond finished with a sigh. "I know."

The Doctor shook his head subtly, in wonder. He was getting more and more curious by the minute to know how she knew him. When would he meet her, for her first time? She had said something about him 'coming back', but hadn't exactly seemed happy to see him on the TARDIS. Well, of course she had basically been pulled away from the middle of her wedding ceremony, so that might be the reason for that anger. He hoped. Amy Pond didn't come across to him as someone you'd want to cross willingly.

A Judoon commander shouted commands to his troops and the Doctor suddenly grabbed Amy's shoulder.

"They're moving our way. You'll be fine, just let them catalogue you. But I need to, um, run."

"You might not be able to hide until they've found what they're looking for," Amy argued. "This place isn't that big."

"I might as well try, and I'll try to find out whom they're looking for in the meantime. Access the patient's records or something. Since they're treating all humans as suspects, it probably means they want something that looks human but isn't."

"Like you?"

Her hand suddenly took his as the troops started thundering down the corridor. He thought he almost felt a surge go through him at the contact. His eyes met hers, the greenest ones he had seen in a long time.

"Like me," he said.

"Come on then," Amy said and pulled a widely smiling Doctor with her back up the stairs.

The chaos was evident even up on the third floor where the Judoon hadn't reached yet. Amy showed the Doctor to an office on his request for a computer, but as he whirred his sonic screwdriver to quickly flip through the records on the screen, he only grunted.

"What's wrong with this computer? The Judoon must have locked it down…"

"Judoon platoon upon the moon," Amy mused behind him, uncharacteristically light-hearted from what the Doctor had seen so far. He would have rewarded her with a smile if the situation hadn't grown to be so dire.

"These plasma coils around the hospital… They would have been building up for days, didn't anyone notice the strangeness before?"

Amy shrugged. "Rory said he got a big electric shock from a locker the other day."

"What's Rory doing with the lockers in the hospital?"

"He's a nurse now," Amy clarified. "And I'm a med student, in case you didn't notice."

"I did, actually. Nice choice of career! A doctor and a nurse married," the Doctor mumbled, still looking at the computer. "How quaint."

"I'm not really a doctor yet," Amy commented. "And, we're not married yet. Thanks to you."

"Yeah, we'll have to look into that later, but for now there's a more pressing matter. They're checking every human, so they don't know what the suspect looks like. Might be a shape changer."

"Can't we just leave the Judoon to find it and then hope that they'll put us back on Earth?"

The Doctor frowned, eyes still glued hopelessly to the screen. "If they declare the hospital guilty of harboring a fugitive, they'll sentence us to execution."

Amy nodded with dread. "So we should find this thing first, just in case they don't. Sounds just like you, Doctor."

He finally glanced up at her with a little smile, which she actually returned.

"But the Judoon are thick! They are so completely thick they wiped the records," he then said with more annoyance. "Maybe there's a backup, else I don't know how we could find the villain without going from person to person like those space thugs are doing."

"What are we looking for?" Amy asked with a glance at the door. People had begun screaming again.

"Oh… Say, any patient admitted in the past week with unusual symptoms."

"Right I'll go ask Mr Stoker. He might be able to figure something out," Amy said determinedly and started walking away.

"Right. And Amy," the Doctor said, making her halt and look back, her hair almost falling out of its bun in the abrupt spin. "Don't do anything stupid."

As he had feared, she grinned widely at that and just left the room. He sighed. Yes, typical ex-companion behavior. Or pre-companion. Depending on whose timeline you were looking at.

Only about a minute later, he gave up trying to restore a backup from the fried records and left the room himself – only to have a redhead in a wedding suit and doctor's coat crash right into him. Her urgent hands clasped his arms and he steadied her by grabbing her waist with both hands. For a split second, he thought of how tall she was. Rose had always been looking up at him, but Amy hardly had to tilt her head upwards to look him in the eyes properly.

"Did you do something stupid?" he asked, seeing her terrified look.

"Yeah, I found her!" Amy replied.

"You did what?"

The crashing sound of a door being kicked down at the end of the corridor made everybody jump. A man completely clad in black leather with a big, round helmet on his head stormed out. And he was running straight towards Amy and the Doctor.

Only one thing to do in this situation. The Doctor grabbed Amy's warm hand in his.

"Run!"


	3. The Non-Humans

_**Wasn't planning on splitting this up but... It got long. And eventful enough. Hope you'll enjoy.**_

_Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who or any of the lovely straws of ginger hair on Amy Pond's head._

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**3 – The Non-Humans**

Amy had no trouble in keeping up with the Doctor's pace as they legged it down to the second floor, made a U-turn in the stairs as they spotted the Judoon coming up just then, and darted into the second floor corridors instead, the black man ever behind them.

Eventually, the Doctor practically tossed Amy inside a room, slammed the door behind them and locked it with the sonic screwdriver just before their pursuer started pulling fervently on the handle.

"What is that thing? Not Judoon, is it?" Amy asked, backing away.

"Not now," the Doctor said and looked around. He had come to this room because of the signs on the outside, and he was in luck. There was an x-ray scanner here that seemed to be fully operational. Even little Leadworth came through once in a while!

"Go there, and when I say 'now', push the button!" he said, motioning for Amy to get behind a set of glass walls, intended to protect the operator from x-ray exposure.

Amy rushed in, urged on by the continuous banging on the door, but her eyes widened at the sight of the complicated controls.

"Which one?"

"The correct one!"

The Doctor sonicked the scanner and aimed it at the door just when it broke down and the man clad in black stepped in with a hostile pose.

"NOW!"

Amy, wishing that she had paid more attention in the instrument introduction courses, made a prayer to the highest force she knew of and threw her hand down upon the biggest button available.

The whole room crackled for a few seconds. There were no flashing lights or bolts, but you could just feel how everything in the room suddenly shifted. Amy slammed her hand over her mouth as she saw the black man weaken and fall down into a weirdly angled pile of limbs on the floor. The Doctor had no doubt heightened the intensity of the scanner to ridiculous levels. And there he was still standing up by the x-ray machine, exposed to the same radiation that had knocked out the black creature.

Amy stared at him.

"What did you do?"

"Increased the radiation by 5000%. Killed him dead," the Doctor said, actually panting. It could have been from the running earlier though.

"But isn't that gonna kill you?" Amy gasped and made a move to get out from behind the safety glass. "Will you have to… Regenerate?"

"Nah, it's only roentgen radiation," the Doctor said with a reassuring smile. "We used to play with gamma bricks in the nursery!"

Amy let out a big breath she had been holding and gave him an angry look. He almost felt a bit guilty for making her worry. Almost.

"It's safe for you to come out by the way. I've absorbed it all."

Carefully, the woman walked out from the safety, back inside the room with the Doctor. He was starting to shudder and twitch awkwardly though.

"You sure you're alright?"

"Yeah, all I need to do is expel it. The radiation. See, if I concentrate…" He jumped on the spot from side to side. "Shift the radiation out of my body and into one spot. Say… My left shoe! Easy does it."

Amy watched, almost in fascination, as the Doctor jumped on his right foot over to the wall, shaking his left foot violently in the process. Finally, he tore the shoe off and tossed it hard down into a toxic waste bin.

"Phew!" he exclaimed with a grin. "All better!"

"You are completely mad," Amy said, arms crossed and obviously trying to look angry.

"Ah. You're right, I do look daft with one shoe," the Doctor agreed with a wink before he bent down and swiftly tossed his right shoe into the waste bin as well. "Barefoot on the moon!" he added dramatically with big eyes.

The façade burst and Amy started laughing. The Doctor felt relieved. Maybe she had finally forgiven him for ruining her wedding. Or whatever other bad things he might have put her through in the past. Her past. His future.

"You never change, do you?" Amy said softly, straightening up a bit. "You just… Move on."

Right. She had not yet understood the situation. She still thought that this him had met her before and for some reason forgotten about her. How could she think that, if she knew about time travel and all its complications? Maybe she hadn't really been traveling with him after all?

He didn't manage to figure out how to put it, before Amy cleared her throat and spoke up again. "So what's this then? Not a human either, I suppose?"

She was bending down near the dark leather man on the floor.

"It's a Slab," the Doctor replied casually. When he earned a skeptical look from the redhead, he continued. "No really, they're called Slabs. Basic slave drones. Solid leather all the way through."

"Someone's got a hell of a fetish," Amy commented. "And oh, I know who it is! A patient who's been here for a few days, Mrs Finnegan. This thing was working for her! Or, at least she ordered it to kill me when she saw me…"

"My sonic screwdriver…" the Doctor whispered from across the room. He had pulled his device out from the x-ray where he had jammed it earlier. It was completely fried now, probably from the x-ray exposure.

"Doctor, she was holding a straw like some sort of vampire..."

"I love my sonic screwdriver!" the Doctor whined on.

A sudden elbow in his ribs made him snap out of it and quickly put the remains of the tool away into one of his bottomless pockets. "Sorry. What?"

"She is the alien villain! She killed Mr. Stoker and sucked his blood!"

"Oh. That's a nasty thing to witness. Are you alright?" the Doctor asked with an eyebrow raised.

"Yes of course, don't worry about me," Amy sighed. "I've seen all kinds of strange things, remember?"

"Right…" the Doctor said slowly, then shaped up. "In any case, funny time for her to take a snack. You'd think she'd be hiding."

"Unless she needs to drink blood in order to hide…?" Amy tried. "I mean, she looks human but they are scanning everybody so they pick up other things as well-"

"Yes! That's it! Clever, Pond!" the Doctor exclaimed and shook her shoulder happily. "Shape changer, internal shape changer! She wasn't drinking blood, she was assimilating it!"

"So if the Judoon finds her first, they'll mark her as a human!" Amy filled in.

"We've got to find her and show the Judoon, fast. Come on!" the Doctor said and once again grabbed Amy's hand.

They darted out of the room but immediately winced and jumped in behind a water cooler to hide. A second slab had just appeared in the end of the corridor. Luckily, it didn't seem to have spotted them and walked right past their hiding place where they were crouching down.

"Thing about slabs – they always travel in pairs," the Doctor murmured.

"Kind of like you do," Amy muttered.

"What?"

"Well, you had me and then you picked up some other girl, apparently," Amy said, probably fiercer than she had intended to, and didn't face him as she got up to stand. "So long as you got a random girl at your side, you're all set, right?"

"What's that supposed to mean? I never travel with random people!"

"Oh what, so me and Rose were special? Was the one after me special too?"

They were staring at each other in the corner of the corridor now. Amy with her fists clenched and her green eyes burning. The Doctor in shock. She knew about Rose. He had told her about Rose.

And she clearly still hadn't made the connection between his mysterious memory loss and time travel shenanigans. The shirt belonging to Rose which Amy had found when she materialized on the TARDIS... she thought it had belonged to someone new, someone he had traveled with _after_ he had left _her_!

His train of thought made him smile, which only made Amy angrier.

"I was about to forgive you! But you're just a daft bloke, like any other bloke, aren't you!"

She stormed off into the next corridor, but the Doctor quickly followed. "Amy wait, the Slab-"

But when Amy turned her head, it wasn't a Slab she met. It was a Judoon troop, marching straight at her. They hesitated for a split second, then seemed to notice that she lacked a cross on her hand; they had used some sort of marker pens to denote which suspects had been identified as humans.

"Doctor, wait!" Amy called out, but too late.

The Doctor blurted out into the corridor after her and turned around just as a Judoon thug raised its scanner and pointed it straight at him.

"Non-human," it stated with a gurgling voice.

"Oops," the Doctor said.

"Execute annihilation!" the Judoon ordered, and as the troop readied their guns, the Doctor wildly grabbed Amy's hand once more and pulled her with him around a corner.

They could almost feel the laser beams from the Judoon weapons scorch the air behind them as they narrowly dodged a sure death. The Doctor held Amy's hand hard as they ran back down to the first floor, but she didn't seem scarred by almost getting killed by a laser gun just now. Rather... Was she smiling as they ran? They locked any doors they could behind themselves and finally found human patients and doctors again.

"The Judoon are logical and just a little bit thick. Oh, they are very thick," the Doctor said as he stepped over legs and bodies on the floor as he walked. "But point is, they won't go back and check a floor that they've already checked. If we're lucky."

Amy, however, stopped to bend down and check on the patients they passed. They were weak and scared. And there was also…

"Martha!" Amy called out and the Doctor spun around.

The dark skinned woman was crouching down next to a patient in a wheelchair, holding an oxygen mask over the patient's face. She smiled weakly at Amy and the Doctor as they approached.

"How are they doing?" Amy asked with a frown.

"Not well. Especially since everybody's figured out by now that we're running out of air – fear doesn't exactly help."

"How much air do you think we've got left?"

Martha looked from Amy to the Doctor, then shook her head. "Not enough for all these people. We're… We are gonna run out soon."

Amy gave Martha a reassuring half-hug before standing up again. The Doctor noticed that she was breathing a little bit heavier than before. She had been running around at the same pace as him, after all. But he was Time Lord. Superior biology, respiratory bypass system… She was only human.

"How are you feeling, Amy?" he asked carefully.

"Running on adrenalin," Amy replied cheerfully, as if she had momentarily forgot her anger from before.

"Good. Now, where's Mr Stoker's office?"

"It's up on the third floor…"

"Oh, right. Not a good place to be right now." The Doctor scratched the back of his head. "You said she was drinking his blood?"

"Yeah, through a straw… In his neck."

"To get to the main artery. She wanted to drain him as completely as possible… A plasmavore, changes its internal status depending on what living substance it feeds on."

"What's she doing on Earth?" Amy asked, throwing worried glances up and down the corridor at the weak people lying around. "I mean, a lot of aliens come to Earth thinking they'll conquer it or something, but she seems alone. Only got those Slabs."

"I don't know, hiding? On the run? But what's she doing now? She's still not safe. The Judoon will execute us all if they don't find what they're looking for."

The Doctor almost got a headache from the thinking. He sat down on an unoccupied bed and buried his face in his hands.

A sigh was let out next to him, and the next second he suddenly felt two steady but soft hands over his temples and sides of his head. He let his hands fall to his lap and realized that Amy Pond was standing right in front of him.

She moved her fingers with some applied force over his scalp, and he couldn't help but gasp after only a few seconds. She knew exactly where to press and how hard to rub without hurting or tickling him. His temples were possibly his most sacred and private body parts, but she wasn't invading, was hardly even touching the skin where no hair grew. As if she knew that it was too intimate for him. As if this wasn't intimate enough.

He didn't object or struggle against her action, but he didn't hide his surprise either.

"Relax," her voice said quietly above his head. "Right now I don't care if you don't remember, but I hate seeing you get winded up like this. And this usually helps."

He let out a breath and closed his eyes. The touch felt good. It made his brain calm down and sort itself out. Then, it suddenly stopped.

His look must have been one of disappointment when he looked up at the loss of her hands in his hair, because Amy let out a snicker, rolled her eyes and poked him in the ribs with her knuckle.

The Doctor started to wonder if she had always had these mood swings and if they were the reason he left her at some point. He quickly erased that silly thought though, and jumped back up to his feet.

"Right," he said, clearing his throat. "Um, thank you. So. If I was a wanted plasmavore, surrounded by police, what would I do?" He looked around as he spoke out loud and suddenly spotted a sign on the wall that made his eyes widen. "Ah. MRI."

"What?" Amy said, looking from him to the signs ahead.

"She's as clever as me. Well, almost."

"What do you mean now, Doctor?"

Just then, the door they had locked at the end of their current corridor was kicked open. The Judoon entered with roars about finding the non-human. Patients scrambled to their feet, panting, trying to get away from the stomping aliens.

The Doctor was even happier for the head massage now, because he needed to think really quickly. The sign he had spotted said MRI and he was sure that that's where the plasmavore would be at once it felt remotely safe from the Judoon's immediate inquisition. But if she had been assimilating Mr Stoker's blood… He would need to intervene before the Judoon reached her. Or else, in one way or another, they would all die. So many innocent people. Better him then, someone who wasn't the least bit innocent.

There was no way he would explain that to Amy now that the space thugs were rampaging mere meters from where they were standing. He had to buy himself time. One way sprung to mind immediately. He tried to discard it and find a better plan, but the Judoon came closer and Amy was staring at him expectantly.

She was counting on him to get them out of this. As if she knew he would pull through, as if she had seen him pull through countless times before. She would definitely be traveling with him in his future, he was absolutely sure of that now. Well, at least she wouldn't remember this moment then, if his future was her past.

"Amy, stay here. I need time, you've got to hold them up."

"Okay, hold them up! How?" Amy practically screamed, eyes on the Judoon who were luckily checking every room on their way to them in the corridor.

"Just, just, forgive me for this," the Doctor said sincerely and suddenly took her face in his hands and forced her to meet his eyes.

Hers were so immensely green with tinges of brown in them, contrasting magnificently with her ginger hair which the Doctor was still a little, tiny bit jealous of. But there was no time to study her features now. If all went well, he'd have plenty of time to write a whole book on her later. Possibly.

"Depending on how you think you know me, this might be very weird. But it could save hundreds of lives and it means nothing. Probably."

And then his lips came crashing down on hers. Amy's eyes widened in surprise at first and she automatically put her hands against his chest to pull him away, but didn't. His cool lips against hers were firm, almost matter-of-factly somehow, just as his careful hands on her cheeks, but she couldn't help but closing her eyes and surrender to the chemicals that her body released into the blood stream without her consent upon the intimate contact.

And then he was gone, leaving her standing in the path of the oncoming Judoon without a word.

He rushed as quickly as he could in the direction that the MRI signs pointed, and tried to focus on the task at hand. But it was difficult.

That wasn't meant to be a kiss. It was meant to be a genetic exchange, a way to trick the scanner to register some of his DNA on her and force them to do a closer scan to determine if she was really human or not. Mixing body fluids would make it stay longer and saliva was the most readily available. But it had felt like a kiss. It had felt like something familiar, yet strange. For the few seconds they had been connected, he had been struggling even then to remember what he was doing.

It wasn't affection, it couldn't be. Sure, Amy was a fun, accomplished ginger woman, but the Doctor didn't just meet people and fall for them. Not even by kissing them. Especially not humans. He was a Time Lord, for crying out loud! It had taken years to even come anywhere near admitting to Rose that he felt...

Then again… The Doctor was no stranger to Amy. To this version of him, perhaps, but from everything he had seen and heard today, she knew him very well. She knew about Rose Tyler. What else had she seen and done? Timelines were twisting in the upper dimensions surrounding them, dimensions he could only sense but not see. If her timelines blurred like that, it could mean that his own were truly intricately vowed in together with hers. He suddenly longed to talk with her. Just talk, without any space police or alien criminals chasing them.

But it had to wait and hope that the timeline where they would finally get to talk would dominate in the end.

Meanwhile, Amy held her ground in the corridor. She seemed to shiver, but she stood tall and watched the Judoon come out from the last room and walk straight up to her.

"I know who you're looking for," she said.

"Scan," a Judoon who had taken off its helmet said and pulled out the tool from its belt.

"She looks human, she calls herself Mrs Finnegan and she's been-

"Non-human," the Judoon said.

"What?" Amy blinked. Then realization struck her and she let out a laughter. "That Doctor… Scan again!" she added at the Judoon. "I'm very human!"

"Justice is swift," the Judoon said and behind it, guns clicked from the troopers.

"No! Wait, listen! I met an alien and he contaminated me! Please, you must scan me more closely!" Amy shrieked, scared that they would actually not give her a second chance.

The Judoon actually held up a hand to make the ones with the guns hesitate, before it pulled up the scanner at Amy's face again.

"Non-human traces detected," it said this time. "Authorize full scan."

The authorization was apparently very quick, because a mere second later, Amy was pushed up against the wall by a crude Judoon hand. The scanner whirred as he moved it up and down over her body, staying a bit longer at her mouth before continuing down once more.

"Time Lord traces detected."

Amy rolled her eyes. "Great, you got me. I made out with an alien. But he's not the villain. There's another alien in this building! She's the bad one!"

"Non-humanoid."

"What was that? Not even humanoid? But you found the alien traces! The rest of me is fully human, I assure you!"

"Non-humanoids excerpt from the suspects," the Judoon boomed on and drew a ring on Amy's hand before putting the scanner back in its place. "Move along."

They marched on, leaving a dumbfounded Amy Pond behind, staring at her hand. But she came back to her senses quickly enough to chase after the troops down the hall. The Doctor had mentioned the MRI; she had to bring the Judoon there and end all this. Somehow.


	4. The Future And The Past

_**My apologies for the longer wait for this update. Life has been busy.**_

_**Disclaimer: **I don't own a plasmavore or the Doctor's tux. That would be plain creepy. Yes, both._

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**4 – The Future And The Past**

The Judoon were thick, so very thick. They really thought they knew best, when Amy was pretty sure that she knew exactly what they were looking for and where to find it. At least from what the Doctor had said. And the Doctor was usually right, no matter how much she found it annoying at times.

"Oi!" she called, running up to the leader of the space thugs as they marched on. "You're going the wrong way! Your alien is in at the MRI!"

"Stand aside," the Judoon boomed and just moved on towards the stairs.

"No, listen, you've got to listen!" Amy said in frustration and grabbed the alien's arm to pull him in the opposite direction.

The Judoon stopped immediately to look at her, and the ones after it halted as well. "Witness the crime," it said.

"What?" Amy stuttered, starting to back away.

"Charge: physical assault. Plea: guilty."

"Oh no, you can't be touchy like that? You're huge space rhinos, I was just trying to get your attention!"

"Sentence: execution," the Judoon stated as it drew its gun.

"Oh, this is really not my day," Amy breathed as she threw herself to the side. For the second time this day, a laser beam barely missed her. She scrambled herself up as the Judoon gave orders to its troops, and ran as fast as she ever could down the corridor, in the direction of the MRI.

The Judoon weren't as slow as they looked, especially not when the one they were pursuing wore a particularly unatlethic bride's dress. But Amy managed to reach the MRI room before they caught up with her. As she pushed the doors open, the sight that met her made her clasp her hands over her mouth.

The Doctor's limp body just fell to the ground in the middle of the room as Mrs Finnegan's last slab released him. Amy just managed to see her put down a straw in her purse before she shone up with a far too wide smile at the newcomer.

Amy's jaw dropped. "What did you do…?" she whispered.

Mrs Finnegan merely smiled mischievously at her. "There you are," she said.

The ginger bride felt her body shaking and she couldn't tear her stare away from the man on the floor. He was pale and completely still. What had gone wrong? How could he have thought that he could take on a slab and the other alien alone? How could this even be possible? The Doctor always survived.

She only barely noticed as the noise of the Judoon marching came to her ears. The only thing she could think of doing was to hastily jump in behind the protective wall for the MRI, much like the one in the X-ray room they had been in before.

When the Judoon entered, Mrs Finnegan stood calmly facing them.

"Now look what you did! This poor man just died of fright!" Mrs Finnegan said, appearing faintly bewildered but not quite able to hide the amusement behind her façade.

"Scan him!" the Judoon chief ordered, and another one knelt down beside the Doctor's body. Its scanner bleeped after only a second.

"Confirmation, deceased."

"Case closed."

"No! He can't be dead! And you've got it wrong!" Amy suddenly called out, getting up from her hiding spot.

The Judoon aimed their guns at her again, but for once seemed to be holding fire when she let up her hands in the air. Maybe they had to make sure it was really her again after they lost her in the chase.

"It was her!" Amy continued, trying to be steady despite the tears she felt already wetting her cheeks. "She killed him! She murdered him!"

"Judoon have no authority over human crime," the leader simply said. "You, however, assaulted the Judoon directly."

"I had to, because you wouldn't listen! That lady, she's not human, she's alien!"

"Oh, but I have been catalogued," Mrs Finnegan mentioned, raising her hand urgently so that the Judoon could clearly see the X the back of it.

"But she's not! She's just assimilated… Oh."

Everything became clear. The Doctor's pale body on the floor, the straw Mrs Finnegan had put back into her purse… The Doctor had let himself be drained of blood. Nothing had gone wrong, that _had_ been his plan. Maybe not all along, but the Doctor was a master at improvising. Only this time, he had had to sacrifice himself for them. The ancient Time Lord gave up his lives for a bunch of humans from Leadworth. Amy didn't know if she would laugh at the pathetic ending or cry at his immensely large hearts. At this time, she was just dangerously close to falling into shock.

"Scan her again, like you scanned me!" she quickly said though, ignoring the tears along her cheeks turning into rivers. "Please, just scan her once more!"

"Case closed," the Judoon stood fast and signaled for his troops to turn around and leave. He added to Amy: "You are pardoned for your earlier crime, for leading us to the conclusion of another."

As Mrs Finnegan snickered contentedly, Amy finally brushed her hands over her cheeks and gave one more look at the thing she had always dreaded seeing the most in the whole wide universe. The Doctor's dead body. Countless memories washed over her and the confusion over him not being able to remember a single one of them came back to her. Unless…

She had never thought of that before. Why had she not thought of that before? The possibility of this being an earlier version of her Doctor. That he really had not met her yet and thus had no way of knowing who she was. But there were so many things that did not make sense if that was true. One being the fact that he lay dead before her now. If he died here, he would never meet her. That meant that either, this was the Doctor she had known after all. Or that he would not die here.

In the end, it didn't matter. Even if the Doctor was gone, Amelia Pond would not give up. She had not given up doing something meaningful with her life after he left her the last time, and she would not give up doing something meaningful now.

"Now, as for you, young lady," Mrs Finnegan said and motioned for the slab to move forward.

But Amy didn't stick around to find out what kind of punishment the alien lady had planned for her. She dashed out of the room and reached the Judoon last in the marching line. Without any hesitation, she snagged the scanner off its belt and turned on her heel. She heard the Judoon proclaiming another crime made by her before their thundering feet started following her back to the MRI.

The slab had just moved out from the room as the redhead returned. It grabbed her with rough arms around the waist when she tried to run past it, but she still reached out the hand holding the scanner, aiming for Mrs Finnegan who stood right by the Doctor's body with a raised eyebrow, and pressed the button.

The lady sighed as the blue light flashed over her features. "What are you doing, child? Scan all you like, I'll show up as perfectly human!"

The Judoon showed up and surrounded the slab holding the girl, aiming their guns as if unsure of whether to fire or not. As if on cue, the scanner gave up a satisfying bleep.

"Non-human!" the Judoon leader said, and Amy actually thought she heard a blend of surprise in its normally monotonely hoarse voice.

"What?" the alien Mrs Finnegan said, crestfallen all of a sudden.

Several other Judoon put away their weapons and scanned the lady again for confirmation. They all nodded.

"It's a mistake, surely, I'm human, I'm as human as they come!" Mrs Finnegan rambled and must have been motioning something towards the slab, because it dropped Amy and started to move towards the lady protectively.

"He gave his life so they would find you!" Amy said sternly as she steadied herself, no longer feeling afraid of the Judoon guns, or of anything that could happen to her.

"Confirmed. Plasmavore," the Judoon said. "Charged with the crime of murdering the Child Princess of Padrivole Regency Nine."

Mrs Finnegan looked from Judoon to Amy to the Doctor on the floor and finally it seemed like her charade was over as her facial features cracked into an inhumanly angry grimace.

"Well, she deserved it! Like she was strutting around, she was begging for the bite of a plasmavore!"

"So you confess?"

"Confess? I'm proud of it!" Mrs Finnegan roared.

She ran in behind the protective wall where Amy had hid earlier and sent her slab towards the Judoon. But they merely had to fire one shot to make the whole creature, leather and helmet alike, evaporate into a burning cloud of gas.

"Verdict: guilty," the head Judoon stated, always the one to keep record. "Sentence: execution."

"Don't talk, get her!" Amy called out, seeing that the lady fiddled something behind the glass wall, wearing a maniac grin.

And she was right. All of the sudden, an alarm went off. A sign on the wall flashed with the words 'Magnetic Overload'.

"Enjoy your victory, Judoon!" Mrs Finnegan screamed at them. "Because you're going to burn with me! Burn in hell!"

The last word was drawn out into a horrifying shriek as Amy was pushed aside and five Judoon at once fired their laser guns at the culprit. Amy didn't even avert her eyes as the beams went right through the glass and the plasmavore finally burst into a cloud of nothingness. Silence fell over the MRI room, except for a strange crackling noise coming from the scanner itself…

"Case closed," the Judoon stated, and they all holstered their guns.

"Wait!" Amy said in a hurry. "What did she mean burn with me? What about the magnetic overload? She did something to the scanner, didn't she? Look at it!"

One Judoon actually humored her inquiries and scanned the machine, which was now even starting to display visual cracks of lightning around it.

"Scans detect lethal acceleration of mono-magnetic pulse."

Amy gasped. "She's killing us all, that son of a… That was her plan, but now you've destroyed the safe chamber!"

"Our jurisdiction has ended," the Judoon chief claimed and motioned for its troops to exit the room. "Judoon will evacuate."

"But do something! You can't just leave us here, that's inhuman… I mean, that's even inhumanoid!" Amy pleaded.

But the Judoon marched out and didn't respond to Amy's desperate pleads. She suddenly noticed that she was almost out of breath. She had been running on adrenalin for so long now that she hadn't noticed that it was noticeably harder to breathe than minutes earlier. Still, she followed the troops all the way to the entrance hall.

"And the air! We're running out of air! You took us away, you have to return us! And you can't return us to Earth with this thing about to go off! You… you can't…"

But all Judoon had exited the building and were on their way out through the air barrier. They were actually going to leave the humans here to explode. Amy steadied herself against a chair in the lobby and tried to make sense of reality. Around her, so many people were moaning or pleading, unless they had already passed out… Even her colleague Martha sat in a corner, arms around a little sickly boy. Neither of them looked awake.

The air and the magnetic pulse… They wouldn't make it after all. Suddenly, it didn't matter at all that they had finally caught the criminal. If they would all die anyways, if the Doctor was already-

The Doctor!

Amy, against better knowledge, ran fast back to the MRI room where she literally crashed down beside the Doctor's body. The machine was now licking the ceiling dangerously with occasional tongues of lightning. But she didn't care. Her Doctor needed her. He always went on about his superior Time Lord biology. Things were looking grim, but he never gave up. And he had taught Amy well.

She clutched his nose with one hand and gently clasped his chin with the other. It had been many minutes since his apparent death, but she had to try. She bent over and enveloped his cold lips with her own. His chest slowly rose as she blew out what little air her lungs had managed to catch, into his. After that, she pushed down hard five times on the left side of his chest and bent down to repeat the artificial breathing as well as she could in this rapidly falling atmosphere of oxygen, but she stopped midair.

"Two hearts…" she mumbled, memories tumbling back and threatening to pull her away into a hazily slumber from the lack of air.

She shook her head and pushed down on the other side of his chest as well, before drawing one more breath that was the hardest one yet, and passing it all on to the man beneath her.

A wave of dizzy relief came over her as she felt him gasp and stir against her mouth. He was alive. Rolling off him with desperate attempts to breathe properly herself now, she didn't manage to turn to look at him, only whisper and hope that he was listening.

"The scanner… She did something…"

The Doctor blinked several times and breathed heavily before he eased himself up on his elbow and watched Amy Pond's eyes close where she lay spread out on the floor beside him. His mind had been paused for a while, but now it worked overtime to catch up with the situation around him.

Amy Pond was unconscious. He had let the plasmavore drink his blood. The aliens weren't here now, but there was an ominous lightshow going on in the corner of the room. She did something… Of course!

Earlier, the Doctor had run to the MRI room only to find Mrs Finnegan already underway with modifying the scanner to meet her purpose. She meant to send out a pulse that would destroy all life on the moon, as well as half of Earth, leaving only _her_ unharmed in the safe chamber. So the Doctor had tricked her into believing that the Judoon had increased their scans, which prompted her to assimilate his own blood since he had also done quite the great job of impersonating an oblivious human being. He couldn't quite tell at the moment if his plan had worked or not, but what was clear was that the safe chamber had been destroyed and that the air was running out rapidly. Even with his more resilient biology, he could feel that, as if the immobile redhead on the floor had not been evidence enough.

Crawling up to standing position, he made his way to the machine's controls and fumbled in a daze for his sonic screwdriver… Retrieving it from the pocket though, he was reminded of that it was utterly burnt and worthless at the moment, making him sigh loudly and wasting another good breath of air. He had to do this manually.

Looking down at the wires which the plasmavore had been changing, he realized that he wouldn't have time to figure out exactly what went where. He had to make a guess. If he did something wrong, they might blow up. If he did nothing, they would blow up with certainty. A guess was their best chance. He grabbed a set of blue contacts and held them tightly, but then changed his mind in the last second and grabbed a pair of red ones instead. Quickly, before he had time to think and endanger them any longer, he forced himself to pull them apart.

He closed his eyes.

A soothing silence made him open them again. The machine had fallen silent. He would have gasped in relief, if he wasn't already gasping for air in general. He staggered back out to Amy and knelt beside her.

"Brave woman," he breathed and brushed his fingers gently over her hair before getting up and exiting the room.

All the humans in the corridor had fallen unconscious by now. The air must be as good as devoid of oxygen at this point. Only his Time Lord lung reserves kept him going as he moved with determination up to the windows at the end of the corridor and leaned against it with his hands on the cold glass.

In the distance, he saw the Judoon ships taking off into darkness.

"Come on…" he whispered. "Come on, reverse it! You must reverse it! Now!"

The ships flew higher, away from the moon, and the Doctor felt his body protesting against him standing up. Against him still clinging to hope. Against everything. That was when he suddenly heard the dripping of water against glass, and looked up. The rain outside was increasing every second, as was the width of the Doctor's smile.

"Look at that, Amy," he sighed to himself. "It's raining on the moon…"

**oOo**

When Amy came to, she immediately sat up straight. She was on a stretcher inside an ambulance, but the doors were open. She was still wearing her bride's dress, but her coat had been taken off and her hair fell loosely around her shoulders.

"Easy there!" a familiar voice came from her side.

Rory sat there, wearing a very worried look. He too was still wearing his clothes from the ceremony. "Are you alright?"

Amy just stared at him for a moment before throwing herself into his arms. Her fiance gingerly patted her back as she just held him for a while.

"Where's the Doctor?"

Rory closed his eyes in her embrace. That inevitable question.

"He said he was just going to park the TARDIS in a better place."

She pulled back from him. "Better place than what?"

"The front lawn. Of the hospital."

"Oh. He took the TARDIS to the hospital?"

"Yeah. Well, I showed him the way, in a way-"

"I need to find him!"

"Amy-"

She literally leaped off the stretcher out from the ambulance, waving away any ambulance personnel or police that tried to approach her, and scouted the area for any sign of TARDIS blue. The hospital was back firmly on the ground, though she suspected that some of the basement would need to be thoroughly checked for cracks after this trip to the moon.

Suddenly, she caught sight of her own relatives in the crowd. She ducked behind a police car and found that Rory had followed her.

"What are they doing here!?"

"The whole _town_ is here. Do you think when something like this happens in Leadworth, that anybody has _anything_ more important to do? And if so, that a wedding reception with the bride and groom missing would be one of those things?"

"True," she sighed. "But I need to get home. Now."

"But-"

"I took your car to get here. We'll take that," she said and started moving towards the parking lot, away from the probing eyes of her family.

"Amy, he could have gone away again, you know that!"

She stopped in her tracks and turned around to glare at him with eyes he knew all too well. But she found no words to speak.

Minutes later, they stopped the car at the Pond residence in Leadworth. As soon as she could, Amy darted out and off. Rory followed only slowly behind, knowing that he would most likely have a devastated fiancée to take care of in a little while.

But when Amy turned around the edge of the hedge, she was met with the wonderful view of the blue box she cherished so. She couldn't help but laugh in relief as she slowly walked up to it and knocked on its door. Rory stayed warily behind the hedge, suddenly too full of thoughts to dare intruding on this moment.

After mere seconds, the door opened up and a lively Doctor appeared, smiling. He was still wearing the tuxedo.

"I thought for a moment there you were gone again," Amy chuckled.

The Doctor nodded but his smile faltered, making Amy's doing so too.

"About that… Amy, there's something we need to set straight."

"I know," she said quietly, making him look up.

"You do?"

"You haven't met me yet, have you?"

Her voice was cracking slightly. It was clear that she didn't like the thought, as he had feared. At least she had figured it out on her own in the end.

"No," he said. "I haven't. Well, obviously I have, today. But not before this. Amy Pond… You are from my future."

Behind the hedge, Rory had to cover his mouth with his hands to not let out a surprised sound. In front of the Doctor, Amy Pond just looked hard at the Time Lord for a few seconds.

"So you don't know anything about what we've been through."

"Nothing."

"You don't know how you met me, when or why."

"No clue whatsoever."

"But when I met you that very first time, you were so eager. You really seemed like you knew what you were doing there. I thought you had been sent to help me and…"

Suddenly, her face broke into a sob. She quickly countered it with a bitter laugh though.

"It's typical. It's really so very typical. When I finally do meet you again, you don't even know me. And when I thought all my life that you came to me for a reason, it turns out," she flung her hands out in a despondent gesture, "that it was myself that sent you all along!"

The Doctor eyed her curiously. "How do you mean now? Oh, Amy!"

She had broken into a full cry now. Behind the hedge, Rory made a move to approach them. But he stayed put when he saw the Doctor move instead, albeit awkwardly so, and put her hands around the ginger woman. The fiance swallowed hard.

The bride didn't let the Doctor hold her for long though. She carefully pushed him away and wiped her tears hastily before clearing her throat.

"It's just typical," she repeated.

"I'm sure it is. Amy… I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

"Don't be. You have an amazing time ahead of you," Amy said, smiling through the sadness again, but this time with much less of a bitter tone. "Such amazing times."

"You know, I do have a time machine," the Doctor said lightly. "I don't have to go now. You could, maybe, come with me on some trip of nostalgia first? Show me something you like so I know where to take you later, eh?"

He was smiling in his special, immature way that Amy knew so well, and it really tugged at her heart, but she shook her head.

"No. Doctor, you know I can't go with you now. We're at different points in our timelines. I can't tell you anything because then it might affect what we end up doing and… Things will just get wibbly wobbly-"

"Timey wimey. I know," the Doctor admitted, less happily now. "I know."

A breeze caught on to the blazingly red hair and made it flutter in between them. The Doctor felt very odd. Timelines were cringing around him, around them, and he was suddenly very unsure of everything. He felt like an all too small bird, tumbling around in the wind with no real idea of where he was going or how to control his destination.

Amy Pond took a deep breath.

"You have to go now. Find me, Doctor."

"Find you how?"

"Didn't you say you had a time machine?"

"Oh, right. Yeah, I do. But where? And when?"

Amy sighed. "I don't know… How much can I tell you? What if I change something?"

"You can't change everything. Sometimes you can't even change anything," the Doctor said, putting his hands on her shoulders. Once again he was struck by how tall she was. "And if you are here, remembering it, chances are it already actually happened. Which means it's a loop. Which means that whatever you're going to tell me now, you have already said it and-"

"Stop it, you're hurting my head," Amy complained, pushing him away again.

"Yeah, sorry."

"I was seven," she blurted out. "I'm twenty-one now. I lived here back then too."

She glanced at the Doctor to see if he would twitch or if it was okay to go on. When he made no move to stop her, she continued.

"I needed help. Badly. And you showed up. And you know what, I don't think you should be wearing a tux when coming to the aid of a kid as a space elf. Think, I dunno, more colorful?"

"Okay, that's enough!" the Doctor exclaimed. "Blimey, what if I end up wearing something really odd now only because you told me here that I would?"

"That's what I was trying to say! It's dangerous!"

"Or worse, really unfashionable," the Doctor said with a grimace. But then he looked into the redhead's eyes with a softer face.

"I will find you, Amy."

She looked back, and it was evident that tears were threatening to overwhelm her again. But she held them at bay for a while longer.

"I know you will."

He stepped backwards until his back hit the TARDIS door. With one more lingering look at the woman whom he was supposedly traveling to find as a child now, he opened the door.

"After this, Pond," he said and flashed her yet another smile. "I will never make you wait again. I promise."

And with that, he disappeared. Only seconds after, the most heavenly yet also most dreadful sound from her past reached Amy's ears; of the TARDIS machinery working its mysterious ways. The Doctor was gone. Again.

* * *

_**At this point it would actually be quite awesome with a review or comment or two. Just so you know, you know.**_

___If you, dear reader, have any ideas for what episodes or elements of episodes you would like to see feature little Amelia and the Tenth Doctor, ranging from Season 3 to Season 7, I would be more than happy if you suggested so in a review. I have a general plan, but I might incorporate some extra adventures if I get good suggestions._


	5. The Crack In The Wall

_**Welp, one whole month. I have no excuses, only shame. Trust me though, this is not abandoned. It's too cool to be abandoned.**_

* * *

**5 – The Crack In The Wall**

Amelia Pond sat down on her bed and sighed. She had been waging a staring war with her wall for days now… At least she thought it had been days. Or maybe the crack in the wall had been there since forever? She wasn't quite sure, but it didn't really matter. What mattered was that she wanted it fixed, because she could live with normal cracks and faults in this old, creaky house. But this was not a normal crack.

She looked away, out the window for a moment. The full moon was lighting up the garden, making the night not seem dark and frightening at all. With a shudder, she quickly turned back to stare at the crack again. Several lamps in her room were lit, so it shouldn't be dark and frightening in here either. But somehow, it was.

Sighing again, she decided that it was time to contact higher powers. She had considered asking the tooth fairy, but she didn't have any teeth loose enough at the moment to justify a request from her. The Easter bunny was out of question, even though it was Easter now, because Amelia hadn't gotten any Easter eggs this year so she assumed that the bunny was crossed with her already for some reason. But there was one guy she could still hope for.

"Dear Santa," she begun, kneeling in front of her bed with hands laced. "Thank you for the dolls, and pencil… And the fish."

Better start off being thankful, right? Even though the fish hadn't been long-lived. Hopefully Santa wouldn't notice if she kept quiet about it.

"It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you. But… honest, it's an emergency. There's… A crack in my wall."

She swallowed and turned to look at it. A simple, seemingly thin but long crack curling across the whiteness above her drawer. Shuddering slightly again, she turned back to see the moonlight dance on the windowsill before she closed her eyes.

"You might want to say it's just an ordinary crack, but I know it's not. Because at night, there's voices." A frown played across her features. "So, please, please, could you send an elf to fix it? Or a policeman. Or a fireman. Or a doctor, just anyone."

Anyone would be better than nobody. She wasn't easily scared, but she couldn't go on living like this.

That was when the strange wheezing noise and the boom were heard. The crack looked the same. But outside the window… What was that odd flashing light coming from the garden?

"Back in a moment," she mumbled politely to Santa before getting up and pulling her curtains aside carefully to see better.

In the middle of her yard, behind the hedge which she could easily see past from her window on the upper floor, stood a big, blue box. It had glowing windows and above those, shining yellow letters saying "POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX".

For a moment, Amelia could only stare. Then, she decided to never skip her vegetables ever again.

"Thank you, Santa!" she breathed before dashing out of her room.

Within seconds, she had pulled on a red jacket and found the flashlight that was always kept in the same place next to the mirror in the hallway in case of emergencies. Since this evidently was one, Amelia took it.

The air was cold and the sight before her now was eerie, but the girl did not tremble. She was no scaredy-cat, after all. The blue box stood silently behind the hedge in her yard, the windows glowing softly. This was beyond odd, but if Santa could travel all over the world and deliver presents in only one night, he could probably summon a police out of the blue as well. Amelia walked up and knocked on the door.

Almost immediately, it opened up. The person who appeared firmly stepped out into the grass and smiled widely at the little girl in front of him.

"Amy Pond!" he said expectantly.

"No… It's Amelia Pond," Amelia replied and scanned him up and down with the flashlight. "Are you really a police?"

He certainly was not dressed like one. On his feet sat a pair of black chucks, tight black jeans clad his legs and above that was a knitted sweater in a very mustard yellow color, seemingly with one big pocket on the front.

"Police, why? Did you call the police?" the man asked her in a suspicious tone.

Amelia pointed her flashlight at the words on the blue box and the man let out a laugh.

"Oh! Right. Well, why would I need to be a police in order to live in a police box? Are you human just because you live in a house?"

"Actually, I am," Amelia replied with a raised eyebrow. "But you're not, are you?"

The man smiled even more widely now and bent down slightly to come level with her face. "Clever, Pond. Actually, I am not, no."

"Because you're an elf!"

That seemed to throw the man off, because his jaw was left hanging for a moment without any words coming out. "Elf. Well. Actually I'm more of… An alien, you see."

"So… A space elf then? And you live in a police box?" Amelia clarified, skeptically.

"Close enough! But I didn't just drop by on vacation. I heard, from a very special friend of mine, that you were in trouble, Amelia Pond," the man said solemnly and straightened up.

Now, Amelia was the one to finally smile. "I do. Can you help?"

"That's my mission! Let's tackle it head on! Where is that problem of yours?"

"Inside the house. There's a crack in my wall."

The man now raised an eyebrow of his own. "Huh, a crack? Have you tried getting your parents to fix it? Or send for someone with the appropriate skills and tools and education to fix it?"

"I don't have parents," Amelia replied blankly.

"Really?" the man said and seemed confused for a moment. "Are you sure about that?"

"Of course I'm sure. Don't you think I would have seen them around the house if they were here?"

The man gave the house in front of him a good look.

"It's a bit chilly here, isn't it? How about we go inside?"

Amy shrugged and led the way. Before she opened the front door to the big house though, a memory from somewhere made her hesitate, hand resting on the handle.

"I'm not supposed to let strangers into the house," she said.

The man halted below the first step of the staircase, making her only a tiny bit shorter than him when she was standing on the topmost one. His chocolate eyes captured her young, green ones through the shady light from the entrance lantern.

"I'm not a stranger, Pond," he said. "I'm the Doctor."

"A doctor?"

"No, not a doctor, the Doctor. That's what I'm called."

"That's your name?"

"Sort of, yeah!"

An elf from Santa in a police box who was called the Doctor. At least this would be a very interesting dream to remember once she woke up. With a sigh, Amelia turned the handle and let the Doctor in.

oOo

The narrow entrance hall felt remarkably similar to when the Doctor had last set foot there, even if that had been very briefly. But other than that, the whole house just felt really strange. As little Amelia took off her red boots and jacket and dutifully put the flashlight back in its dedicated spot, the Doctor strayed further into the first floor without a word.

There was a living room, big and cozy – perfect for a family of at least three. The cushions were pushed together in the corners of a roomy couch, as if several people usually sat there comfortably together.

"My room is upstairs," Amelia's voice came from behind him.

"Just a moment," the Doctor said, still eyeing the room with careful eyes. "Gotta check these other walls for… Cracks."

"There are no other cracks, I've already checked!" Amelia sighed as she followed the man into the kitchen.

The Doctor walked around the room for a minute or so, opening up drawers, looking closely at notes on the fridge and scanning a few things with the screwdriver without Amelia seeing it. She obviously heard the mechanical noise though.

"What are you doing?"

"So, you have no parents," the Doctor finally said spinning around and putting his hands on the kitchen table, opposite from the girl. "Who's taking care of you?"

A few seconds passed before she answered. "Nobody."

"You're saying you live here alone?" the Doctor asked slowly.

"Yes, what about it? I can take care of myself."

"How old are you?"

"Seven. But I said I can take care of myself!"

"You cook your own food?"

"Obviously," Amy scoffed with a nod to the dirty dishes.

"And do you have friends over often?"

"Sometimes, why?"

"There are plates here with remnants of the same food on them. They've been out in the air for the same amount of time so they were eaten on during the same dinner. Unless you use different plates when you grab another portion, there were several people eating these dinners."

He had leaned in over the table when speaking, without noticing it. Amelia had leaned back in her chair just the same. Again a few seconds passed before she replied.

"I had friends over, of course. What has this got to do with my crack?"

"Oh, maybe nothing, maybe everything. Can never be too sure, but when several strange things appear in one and the same place at the same time, chances are they are not completely unrelated," the Doctor said, but then saw the distressed look on the girl's face and decided not to push it for now.

Maybe he was just looking too hard for mysteries. The grown-up Amy Pond had told him that she needed him to save little Amelia. She obviously had an evident problem that needed fixing, so he'd better start there. So he smiled and relaxed.

"Let's have a look at that crack then."

Once they entered Amelia's room, it was easy to spot the giant crack. It went from one wall to the other, crossing the whole room on one side. The Doctor immediately understood how anyone would feel uneasy with this in their room. However, he himself mostly felt curious.

He darted up to the wall, put on a pair of glasses from nowhere and started feeling at the crack with his long fingers. Amelia watched him prod and walk forth and back for a while, before he picked up the sonic screwdriver and scanned the rift with one elegant sweep.

"What's that?" she quickly asked, as he had known she would.

"It's a sonic screwdriver!"

"Sort of like a magic wand?"

"Oh, much better than any wand. All elves have these. And it tells me that… Oh."

The last word was said so dramatically that Amelia's eyes widened. "What?"

"This crack… Do you know what it really is?"

"What?" Amelia repeated as they both took a few steps back from the broken wall.

"It's a crack," the Doctor swallowed. "But not in the wall. It's a crack in the universe itself. Two parts of space and time that should never have met."

"In my bedroom?" Amelia asked, as if that was the best thing she could think of saying at the moment.

"It's got nothing to do with your bedroom," the Doctor said and stepped up to the wall again, putting his finger along the crack anew. "If you removed this wall, the crack would still be here. And… Can you hear?"

He suddenly put his ear against the wall. There was a low murmuring, or whispering. Or roaring even? He couldn't distinguish any words. No wonder it made the girl afraid.

"A voice, yes," Amelia whispered, clutching her bedpost a few meters away. "There's voices at night. That's how I knew it wasn't an ordinary crack."

"Clever Pond," the Doctor said and spun around in search of a fitting tool.

He found a glass of water standing on the bedside table and emptied it over his shoulder in a hurry, much to Amelia's disgust. Pressing the glass to the wall and his ear to the glass let him hear the voice clearly.

"Prisoner Zero…"

"Prisoner Zero has escaped! That's what it says," Amelia agreed. "What does it mean?"

The Doctor furrowed his eyebrows for a moment, still listening to the voice. "It could mean that there's another part of space and time on the other side of this crack. Where there's a prison… And an escapee."

Suddenly, the Doctor felt a small hand on his back and turned around. Amelia looked up at him, more afraid than he had seen her so far. The face of the adult Amy Pond, braving aliens and lack of air on the moon, came to his mind. Would this girl grow up to become her?

"Can you close it?"

"Of course!" he assured her with a smile and took off his glasses, putting them back into the pocket on the front of his bright sweater, which was of course bigger on the inside.

He pulled away the drawer that stood beneath the crack, leaving the wall clear of any furniture, and then positioned himself in the middle of the room, pointing his sonic screwdriver at the abomination.

"If we open it up completely, enough spatial and temporal energy should flow through to make the crack seal itself in a matter of seconds. Or minutes. Pretty fast, at least. I think."

Amelia glanced up at him, unsure. He kept smiling and took her little hand in his.

"Either that, or…"

"Or what?"

"Well. You know when grown-ups tell you that everything is going to be fine, but you know they're probably lying to make you feel better?"

The redhead rolled her eyes knowingly. "Yeah."

The Doctor smiled even wider. "Everything is going to be fine!"

He activated the sonic screwdriver and the crack immediately started glowing and growing. Soon, the Doctor and Amelia Pond found themselves facing a hole as big as the wall. The Doctor, still holding onto Amelia's hand, stepped closer curiously. It was dark on the other side, but he thought he could glimpse metal bars and corridors. The other side could really be anywhere in the whole universe. And anytime.

"Hello?" he called out cheerfully.

Without warning, a huge eyeball showed up on the other side of the rift, covering almost the whole hole in the wall. It darted from the Doctor to Amelia and back several times.

"Prisoner Zero has escaped!" a low but loud, rumbling voice boomed through the hole.

"What's that?" Amelia breathed behind the Time Lord, clutching his hand hard now.

The Doctor was just about to politely ask the big eyeball that question, in more sophisticated words of course, when he suddenly felt something poke him hard near the hips, making him stumble down onto Amelia's bed. At the same time, the rift seemed to have reached its maximum energy flow. It rapidly sealed itself, the eyeball ever darting between them until all that was in front of them was a wall with an ordinary crack in it.

"Are you hurt?" Amelia worriedly asked the Doctor.

He grabbed the bedpost and fiddled with his front jeans pocket until he pulled out his trusty psychic paper. For easy access, he had not put it among the jumbled mess of items in his deep front pocket on the sweater. But having tight jeans apparently made the trouser pockets rather inaccessible.

"No, I'm not hurt. It was my nifty psychic paper, picking up a lovely little message. 'Prisoner Zero has escaped'."

"That's what they keep saying. Was that prisoner Zero? The eye?"

"I rather think it was the prison guard," the Doctor said thoughtfully as he put the psychic paper into the big pocket this time, for easier access after all. "But why tell us? Unless…"

His eyes narrowed as he formed a thought that was not exactly pleasant, coupled with everything else he had seen in Amelia's home up until now. He glanced at the crack in the wall again. Silent and finally without the uneasy atmosphere around it.

But then something surprising in the corner of his eye made him completely forget about the topic at hand.

"What's this?"

The Doctor's hand had been resting right next to where a scarf was flung over the edge of the bed. A long scarf, striped with a lot of random colors. Knitted, thick; it would probably cover all of Amelia if she wired it as many times as possible around herself. The Doctor grabbed it and held it up in front of him with wide eyes.

"It's just an old scarf," Amelia said, not at all understanding his fascination. "What about Prisoner Zero?"

"But this scarf… Where did you get it?" the Doctor urged on and put his glasses back on to examine it more closely.

"I've always had it."

"You mean your mother knitted it for you when you were little?"

"No, I just always had it. As long as I can remember. It's not like I use it much. Why's that important?"

"It's just that, I have one that looks exactly the same," the Doctor laughed. "Well, maybe not quite as well used. Even though it is very well used, I have to say. It's seen everything from Daleks to Gallifrey and…"

Silence came over him as he realized what he was doing. He should not talk about his planet and the Daleks to a little girl from Earth. He hadn't even talked about Gallifrey with Rose. But this scarf looked so much like the one he had been running around with in his fourth incarnation. If he didn't know for sure that his own was hanging on a forgotten hook in the corner of the TARDIS wardrobe, he would have thought that Amelia had climbed into his ship and stolen this. Which was of course preposterous in every way.

"Maybe it was bought somewhere then, and you went to the same store. It's not that weird," Amelia explained, wrinkling her nose. "Or don't space elves buy clothes in stores?"

"Of course not, buying clothes would be too human," the Doctor said with a smile. "Too boring."

He got to his feet and let out a big sigh. "But this crack… Where were we again?"

"Where do you come from, really?" Amelia suddenly asked, now too led away from the earlier matter. "If you're not even wearing your scarf, I don't believe you are from the North Pole."

"North Pole?" the Doctor laughed. "I told you, I live in my… Uh, police box."

"How can you live in a box?"

The Doctor hesitated for a moment, to think.

It was still hard to think of this little curious yet insecure girl as being the same person as the bride in the doctor's coat. But Amy Pond had told him that they had seen a lot together, that there were many adventures waiting for him. There was something very wrong with this house, some pieces missing from a puzzle in which he didn't yet quite know what the final picture should look like. While part of him was annoyed that Amy Pond had not downright told him how everything would turn out, he also felt his sense of adventure tickle him from within.

Little Amelia. Alone in a big, quiet house, facing cracks in the wall and escaped alien prisoners. Not on his shift.

Luckily his brain worked so fast so he had time to think all this before even one second had passed.

"I'll tell you a secret," he said. "But you must promise not to tell anyone else unless I say it's okay."

Amelia nodded eagerly.

"It's not just a box. It's a time machine. And a spaceship. All in one!"

"You've got a time machine?" Amelia said skeptically.

"Yep!"

"A real one?"

"And a spaceship!"

"So you really are a space elf after all?"

"Totally not from the North Pole, in any case," the Doctor assured her, before taking a casual glance around her bedroom. "Tell you what… This place gets a bit boring when your friends aren't around, doesn't it?"

Amelia seemed to drift off into that odd state of silence for a few seconds again, before she nodded with a sigh.

"So what do you say…" the Doctor began while grabbing the long, striped scarf from the bed again.

He gently wrapped it a few rounds loosely around Amelia's neck, almost covering her head and making her giggle.

"You come with me to my police box and check out my own scarf? And, I dunno, maybe take a trip somewhere else for a while? Travel in time, or just in space… or both?"

Two green eyes, bigger than ever, stared up at him from above the rim of the old scarf. "You'll take me with you?"

"Yeah, why not? I don't have friends over as often as you do, and could use the company. Besides, you really gotta check out my scarf."

He really didn't need to say anything more to convince her. A minute later, they were out in the garden again. Since the Doctor assured her that his ship could provide clothes and anything she needed, Amelia hadn't bothered changing from her night gown as she followed him out.

The blue box looked so strangely magnificent where it stood in the pale moonlight, glowing softly, that even the Doctor shivered slightly from suspense when they approached it. Maybe this was part of the reason why he had not even stayed a space hermit after the Time War, why he had let Rose come with him. Whenever a new person experienced the TARDIS, even if it was just Rory Williams glimpsing its inside briefly, the Doctor was sure that he could feel a bit of what they were feeling. The excitement. The wonder. The things he had left behind long ago and could only feel through others now.

Like Rose Tyler had made him feel so much.

Could Amelia Pond make him discover even more things about himself? The mind of a child was very different from that of a grown human. Maybe this was just what he needed, after all.

He opened the door for the girl, whose eyes practically glittered at the sight she stepped towards. But before he followed her inside himself, he couldn't help glancing back at the house they were leaving behind.

"Is this how you mean that I save you, Amy?" he whispered to himself. "For how long?"

So many new mysteries, and so far no conclusions. He shouldn't complain though. He wasn't exactly the kind of man who appreciated a calm, uneventful life.

The blue door finally closed behind him, and the Doctor didn't see the shadow that moved in the window of Amelia Pond's bedroom.

* * *

_And they are off! I hope I make the characters true enough to themselves. Appreciate comments though._


	6. The Street Of Mystery

_**I will try to not make each episode I'm featuring too long.; Amelia won't stay 7 forever. But at the same time, it's really fun to make it different and go in depth when little Amelia is with the Doctor instead of some grown up companion. Keep throwing suggestions of episodes at me if you want.**_

* * *

**6 – The Street Of Mystery**

Little Amelia had at first been wordlessly walking around the console room. But it was not long until a smile broke up her face and she started giggling almost uncontrollably.

"So, anything you want to say?" the Doctor said in casual tone, leaning against a coral pillar. "Any passing remarks? I've heard them all!"

"It's smaller on the outside!" Amelia stated.

That actually surprised the Doctor. People usually called it bigger on the inside, not the other way around. Already, the mind of a child showed to be refreshing to have onboard.

"True! Oh right, I almost forgot. Be right back," the Doctor said and scuttled off to one of the doors leading deeper into the TARDIS.

"What's in there?" Amelia asked curiously.

"Everything! But we'll take that later. Stay here for now, okay?"

Hoping that she'd still be amazed enough to not wander off already, the Doctor disappeared into the corridor while Amelia kept walking around the outer wall, mouth slightly agape as she took it all in. The room was spacy, round with the walls coming together far above them like a cone. The pillars that sprouted from the floor here and there and connected with the roof after a few bends and twists were all a yellowish color, but the grating that made up most of the floor was metal. So was the central console, round with countless buttons, levers and counters blinking on it, and with a tall, blue pillar made of something else in the very middle. Glass? Plastic? Crystals even? Regardless, it was all very fascinating to the little girl from the sleepy town of Leadworth.

"Aha! Now we match," the Doctor's enthusiastic voice suddenly came.

He had reappeared in the console room, now wearing an almost perfect copy of Amelia's long scarf. His face fell a bit when he realized that she had already taken hers off and hung it over the railing.

"So this is a time machine… And a spaceship?" she said.

"Oh yes!" the Doctor exclaimed, more happily.

"So you can travel anywhere… Anytime?"

"Oh yes!"

"Could we go to see the dinosaurs?" Amelia said challengingly.

"Certainly, but the air was rather smelly back then, just a warning."

"How about the future, with more spaceships?"

"Absolutely!"

"In space?"

"Where else would you get a good look on a spaceship?" the Doctor asked with rolling eyes and pressed a couple of buttons. "Future… Space… There we go, hold on!"

They both clung to the console as the TARDIS shook hard. But in mere seconds, the Doctor flew up cheerfully and ran up to the TARDIS' outer door. When he opened it to reveal nothing but empty space and stars, Amelia gaped. She slowly walked up to stand beside the man in the mustard yellow shirt and colorful scarf.

Outside was the universe. A sun shining brightly some light years away, stars littering every corner of Amelia's view and a blue color from a nearby nebula tainting the background beautifully. It was breathtaking. The Doctor glanced at her thoughtfully.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I just didn't really think I'd end up in space. Ever."

"Oh, you were always in space, you know. The whole of Earth lives in it! But I admit this might feel different, of course. Do you like it?"

"Yes!"

The Doctor liked her reaction. No disbelief, no fright. Just wonder and acceptance. They were in space, it was as simple as that. Not too many hows or whys.

"How are we breathing?" Amelia then asked.

"I've extended the air shell," the Doctor sighed, wondering how technical he could get with this child without confusing her too much. "But gravity won't exactly work the same if you jump out there so… Don't."

Amelia nodded dutifully. "And that's the spaceship?"

The Doctor raised an eyebrow and followed her pointed finger with his gaze.

"Oh, look at that! Amazing, isn't it?"

Below them, or at least below what would now be the underside of the TARDIS in their current perspective, was indeed a huge ship on its way through space. It didn't look like you'd imagine a conventional spaceship to look, though. This was littered with tall buildings, gleaming windows and blinking streets. It was as if someone had taken a few cities directly from Earth, lumped them together and placed them onto the surface of a ship. And the Doctor knew that this was sort of exactly what had happened.

"It looks like a city."

"It does!" the Doctor said and whirled back towards the console while Amelia kneeled down to try and get a better look. "See, in your future, 29th century to be precise, solar flares practically roast the Earth."

Amelia looked back at him in shock.

"Oh, don't worry, you'll be long dead by then," the Doctor reassured her without much success as he started tugging at levers again. "And even if you weren't, the entire human race packs its bags and moves out until the weather improves anyways!"

"You mean they go to live on spaceships until Earth is fine again?" Amelia asked skeptically, still sitting at the open TARDIS door.

"Yes," the Doctor said. "You migrate to the stars. Whole nations build their own huge spaceships and take off. This below us, this is the united kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland. All of it, bolted together and floating in the sky. Starship UK. It's Britain, but metal! A whole country, living, breathing… shopping!"

"That sounds like a story book."

"My whole life is a fairytale," the Doctor laughed before resting his hand in anticipation on one particular lever. "And now yours is too. Want to check it out?"

Amelia got up on her feet and walked slowly up to the Time Lord, crossing her arms in front of her.

"Are you supposed to interfere with people when you travel in time? Can't you accidentally erase yourself or something?"

"Oh, time isn't that fragile," the Doctor assured her. "Timelines bend and twist, they are always in flux. History _can_ change."

He suddenly remembered what he had told the older Amy only hours earlier on his own timeline.

_You can't change everything. Sometimes you can't even change anything._

"But it doesn't have to. Sometimes events are just meant to be. Fixed points in time. And anyways, we are in your future now, so there's no risk of erasing yourself here!"

Amelia looked even more skeptical now.

"What I mean is," the Doctor said gently, "that if we are careful, it's unlikely that we will change anything really important. So, shall we pay your grandgrandgrandgrandchildren a little visit?"

She accepted. Moments later, after another TARDIS jump that luckily was well timed and aimed, they stepped out onto a scene that was very strange to Amelia. The TARDIS had landed in what looked like a long, dirty street. There were market stands, coffee shops and restaurants lining the street, but no cars or other motor driven vehicles. A couple of bicycles spun past them though. Far above them were big glass windows, showing the dark, starry sky outside.

"A city on a spaceship indeed," the Doctor mused. "Now, there's a few rules you need to follow when traveling with me," he spoke up and grabbed Amelia's arm to make sure that she was listening. "One: do everything I tell you. Two: don't ask stupid questions. Three, and I cannot stress this enough: do not wander off!"

A dangerous smile tugged at the girl's lips and the Doctor knew instantly that he had seen it before, when he had told the older Amy to not do anything stupid. Finally, the last doubt he had about them being the same person flew away. Pond was Pond, definitely.

"Right," the Doctor sighed but started walking away from the TARDIS down the street. "This particular area we are in now… I believe it's the London Market."

As if on cue, a soothing female voice boomed out from speakers somewhere, over the noise of the crowd: "Welcome to London Market. You are being monitored. London Market is a crime free zone."

"We actually are in the future," Amelia breathed.

A bicycle taxi almost ran Amelia over, but the Doctor swiftly swooped her out of harm's way with a casual movement.

"Space in the future!" she continued with his arm around her, as if nothing had happened. "But why is everything dirtier than my kitchen? I thought they would have teleports and holograms."

"Yeah, life on a giant starship for a long time can mean back to basics. Bicycles, washing lines, wind-up street lamps…"

He stopped to look, really look at the street around them. His keen senses picked up details, detected moods, looks, drank in the atmosphere like only a Time Lord's could.

"But there is something wrong here," he said in a low tone.

"Maybe there's a crack in a wall," Amelia suggested playfully.

"Maybe…"

The Doctor suddenly marched up to a table outside of a coffee shop and surprised the customers by picking up a glass of water without asking for permission. Amelia saw his deep frown as he put the glass down on the metal floor that covered all of the street, and just seemed to watch the glass closely for a while.

The customers seemed too confused to ask what was going on and Amelia rolled her eyes and decided to just wait out the Doctor's antics. She had seen him do weird things with glasses of water before, like when he emptied hers on the floor in the middle of her room without a second thought.

Something a couple of meters away grabbed her attention. On a bench sat a girl, perhaps just a little bit older than Amelia herself, and she was crying. People rushed by her on the street, but didn't even as much as glance at her. Or if they did, they must have been looking away immediately again. There was something really strange about the situation, but Amelia couldn't put her finger on it. She just decided that since she was now traveling through time and space with a space elf, it was maybe her job too to help people whenever she could. So she walked up to the girl and sat down next to her on the bench.

At first, the girl looked up and just stared at Amelia like a frightened animal.

"Hi," Amelia said, trying to keep in mind how cheerful the Doctor had been when he first stepped out to meet her. "I'm Amelia Pond. Who are you?"

"Mandy…"

"Why are you crying?"

Mandy looked around her, as if afraid of answering. "Why are you asking?"

Amelia frowned. "Because I never cry, but sometimes I feel like I want to. But I guess it's not a good thing to actually be so sad that you cry. So I wanted to help you."

"You can't help," Mandy said, sounding like Amelia was crazy. "Timmy was supposed to meet me here, but he didn't."

She ended her sentence there, as if Amelia was supposed to know what came next. As Amelia made a face that clearly said that she didn't, Mandy continued quietly: "He got sent down below. There's nothing to be done."

"What's down below?"

But Mandy gasped then, looking at something behind the other girl. Amelia turned around to see the Doctor watching them and slowly approaching from a distance, stroking his long scarf thoughtfully. When she turned back, Mandy had gotten up and left in a hurry, not as much as looking back.

"Why did you do that?" Amelia said scornfully when he came up to her bench.

"Oh, I'm not sure, instinct… I didn't make anyone mad, luckily, I told them there was an escaped fish. Which, actually, can happen."

"Not the glass thing! Why did you scare Mandy away?"

The Doctor's eyes narrowed as he looked in the direction to where the older girl had disappeared. "I did? Interesting."

Amelia's face turned from scorn to anticipation. "Interesting?"

"Very," the Doctor said and sat down beside her. "Look at our surroundings. Look at the dirty walls and the behavior of the citizens. Do you notice something?"

She didn't want to disappoint the space elf on their first mission to help others, so Amelia looked as hard as she could. People behaved normally, from what she could see. The shops didn't look anything weird, although the bike taxis were a bit odd. But everything couldn't be the same in the future, after all. She felt the Doctor watch her and looked even more closely, without acknowledging his gaze.

Then she saw it. Here and there along the street, in particular close to entrances or elevators, there were strange booths. Boxes tall as a man, not quite as big as the Doctor's phone box, with glass windows on each side. Inside, there seemed to be robots or dolls, sitting there with kind faces of plastic or some other material, well lit up as if they were meant to be an information booth. Very well lit up… And clean.

She only needed to look back at the Doctor and see his nod to understand that he knew what she had discovered.

"This place is being monitored, that's what the speakers said. A crime free zone. And look at the booths. They seem to be there for some sort of information or security, but nobody steps close. Nobody even lays a finger on them. Why are people afraid of the booths?"

"Or the thing in the booths," Amelia commented. "Very ugly."

"Indeed," the Doctor said. "And oh…"

"What?"

"It's my brain."

"What, is there something wrong with it?"

"A lot of people have asked that, myself included, but I don't think that's the case this time. It's just working, working a lot. I think there is something I'm seeing but not understanding. I need to…"

The Doctor slowly got up from his seat and looked from the TARDIS to Amelia to the booths indecisively.

Amelia stood up too. "Are we going to help someone?" she asked, almost sounding demanding.

A sigh escaped the Doctor. He really wasn't sure of this. On one hand, he had promised Amy Pond and himself to save little Amelia – he really shouldn't bring her into more potential danger now. But on the other hand, he could really never resist a good mystery. And Amelia had the brain – the working brain – to become a brilliant assistant in solving these mysteries. If only she wasn't so young.

But then again, the Doctor had never really cared for age. He was over 900 years old himself and felt like a 7 year old kid from time to time, but other times – like now – his brain was an old soggy mess. He did really appreciate the viewpoints of a true child. Perhaps some mysteries could be even easier to solve with her by his side.

Once again, his overworking brain did all this worrying in a matter of microseconds.

"We are going to do what I always do," he said.

"Say a bunch of weird stuff?"

"No! Stay out of trouble!"

Amelia raised a very skeptical eyebrow.

"… Badly," the Doctor added guiltily. "Okay. How about you hurry after Mandy and ask her what's the deal with the thingys in the booths."

"You want me to run off?" Amelia asked. "But you told me not to run off."

"I also told you to always do what I told you and not ask stupid questions. So, it's either this or Leadworth. What's it going to be?"

Amelia couldn't help but smile, which was enough of an answer for him.

"Meanwhile, I am going to do a bit of exploration. Meet me back at the TARDIS in one hour!"

"What's the TARDIS?" Amelia asked curiously and the Doctor flinched, realizing that this elf background story might not hold up forever.

"It's… What I call my blue box. I'll go into details later, alright?"

With one last nod, Amelia hurried off to where she saw Mandy leave the street. The Doctor stayed put and watched her go with an uneasy feeling in his stomach. Letting a 7 year old run off on a spaceship in the future… But it wasn't like anything bad could happen to her in one hour if she only ran about looking for another girl. This place couldn't be that bad.

He hoped.

Amelia wished that she had had time to ask Mandy where she lived, or that she had met someone else to ask. The corridors that led away from the big London Market were increasingly winding and just when she started to wonder if she would even find her way back again, a voice from behind made her jump.

"You're following me."

She spotted Mandy walking out from behind a big crate.

"No, I was just… Well, I just wanted to ask you something."

"We shouldn't talk about it. Why are you so dumb? Do you want to get taken?"

"Taken? You mean like your friend was?" Amelia asked, trying to not take offense.

"Just go back," Mandy said, eyes shifting to something behind Amelia once again. "You'll get me into trouble."

Amelia turned around and saw another one of the booths with the smiling faces in them. She ignored Mandy's frustrated warnings and walked right up to it and prodded the glass.

"These things, why are you so afraid of them? Are they watching you?"

But Mandy didn't reply, she just watched the smiling face breathlessly.

"And what is this?"

Amelia had noticed the road ahead, which was blocked by a large red and white striped tent and plenty of warning signs. The tent's opening was even tied together and locked with a grand brass lock.

"A roadblock. We have to go back and take another way," Mandy said. "Come on!"

But Amelia didn't want to stop in the middle of a mystery. She did as the Doctor had told her and looked harder. And she heard something. A clanging noise from within the tent.

"There's something going on in there!"

"Please, just leave it!" Mandy pleaded, eyes once again glued again on the booth.

As Amelia slowly stepped closer to the tent, she didn't see what Mandy saw. The smiling face suddenly started turning around, revealing its backside. It showed an angry face instead of the friendly smile from before.

"Why would they have to lock it if there wasn't something they wanted to keep from people?" Amelia thought out loud and sat down in front of the lock.

She couldn't get it open, so she tugged on the edge of the fabric and concluded that she was tiny enough to crawl underneath it into the tent.

"No!" Mandy screamed after her as the red head disappeared under the striped mesh.

She watched in horror and took several steps back as the angry face in the booth now turned once more… The new face did not hold a smile of any kind. It was blazing red and angry like a monster from a nightmare. Mandy's worst nightmare.


	7. The Impossible Ship

**_Definitely enjoying thinking up how Amelia and Ten would react differently to things than Amy and Eleven did.  
_**

* * *

**7 – The Impossible Ship**

The engine room on Spaceship UK was not very easy to find. At least not if you were a random citizen. The Doctor was neither random nor a proper citizen though, and it wasn't long before he ran through the last corridor outside what should be the engine. Stopping at the end of the corridor, he scratched his head before he turned around and ran through it again, face scrunched up in concentration. Then he decided to slowly pace its length and this time stopped in the middle. Something was very wrong.

The walls were cool to the touch, and the area was quiet. It would have made a pretty great place to put a library actually, the Doctor couldn't help but randomly thinking as his brain worked on deeper things underneath the surface of his mind. One of the walls had large power cords running across it. He scanned them with the screwdriver and the results made his face scrunch up even more.

He backed away, when his foot suddenly touched something on the floor. A perfectly normal glass of perfectly normal water, from the looks of it, standing there in the middle of the corridor. But no one to be seen who could have put it there. Things started to click and the deep thoughts finally surfaced as the Doctor jumped down on his knees and watched as the water stilled after having been nudged by his shoe. The ripples subsided. No new ones formed. He couldn't resist grinning as realization struck him.

Footsteps then approached, making him glance upwards.

She was standing at the end of the corridor, a shadow in the yellow spray of light from a lantern on the wall, peering up at the Doctor from beneath a velvet hooded robe.

"The impossible truth in a glass of water," she said and her voice was merely a whisper.

The Doctor leapt up and raised an eyebrow. "Hello?"

"Not many people see it, but you do," the woman continued, then paused for the tiniest of moments before she added: "Don't you, Doctor?"

"You know me?" Between this stranger and Amy Pond in the TARDIS, this was starting to feel repetitive.

"Keep your voice down!" she hushed. "They're everywhere. Tell me what you see in the glass."

"Well, who says I see anything?"

"Don't waste time, Doctor! In the marketplace, you put a glass on the floor, looked at it and then came straight here to the engine room. Why?"

The Doctor eyed her suspiciously. Her face was almost completely hidden. She was trouble on two legs, all his senses told him that. Yet, he couldn't resist the new mystery.

"Are you asking me because you're wondering or because you're wondering if I'm still wondering or have unlocked the wonder?"

"Doctor."

"Alright! It's easy really. My brain just chose to work it out somewhere inside before letting me know what it was up to. It does that sometimes," the Doctor rambled on. "I don't know about yours, but I have the stinging feeling that you already know what I'm about to say. So I might as well spill it."

He walked up closer to the woman and with only a meter's distance she looked like she was about to take a defensive step back when he finally stopped.

"There's no vibrations on deck," he said darkly. "Ship this size, you'd easily be able to feel the vibrations of the monstrous mass of an engine that would be required to propel it through space. At least with human technology and I know for a fact that there's not enough alien tech on board these ships of this time to circumvent this in any way. So."

"So," the woman echoed, her eyes glimmering through the mask.

"So there is no engine." The eyes kept glimmering as the Doctor's face fell. "It sounds too impossible when said out loud, really. But look!"

He ran up to a power box on the wall and ripped it open. Inside was the ends of two power cords, which the Doctor had expected – but they were not connected.

"Nothing is connected, behind this wall there's nothing, it's quiet and nothing is running because there… There is no…"

"No engine at all," the woman finished for him.

"But it's impossible!" the Doctor insisted. "This ship is working, I saw it flying through space."

"The impossible truth, Doctor. We are traveling through space in a ship that cannot fly."

"How?"

"I don't know! There's a darkness at the heart of this nation and it threatens every one of us!"

The woman's voice became more urgent, until she seemed to remind herself and took a deep breath.

"Help us, Doctor."

"You know who I am. Won't you explain who you are?" he retorted sharply.

"It's unsafe. And your little friend has run into trouble."

The Doctor's face paled. "Amelia?"

"Don't worry. She will be alright. You will find her in this location," the woman said and tossed out a device to the Doctor.

He managed to catch a glimpse of her arm, finding its skin to be of a dark brown color.

"What's this?" he said skeptically and held the thing up in his hands. It was large as a handheld gaming console and seemed to have some sort of bleeping map on it.

"It's a device with a map that bleeps when you get close to a target. Any more questions, Doctor?"

"Plenty! How do I find you again?"

The mask stared at the Doctor for a moment as she backed towards the end of the corridor.

"Call me Liz 10," she finally said, and the Doctor thought he heard a sigh of resignation. "And I will find you."

Her red robes swayed behind her as she left through a neighboring corridor. The Doctor was tempted to simply follow her to get more answers, but the urge to find Amelia was stronger. With a clenched jaw, he started running to where the bleeping map pointed him.

**oOo**

Amelia groaned and found her neck to be sore. Had she fallen asleep on the sofa again? She blinked and realized that she was sitting in an uncomfortable chair, slightly too big for her small body. Reality crashed into her as she suddenly knew that she was very far from her sofa and Leadworth. She was seeing space in the future with the Doctor. But how had she gotten here?

The room she was in was perfectly square, with a lot of screens on the wall directly ahead of her. But against another wall stood something that made her frown. It was a smiling booth, as bright and clean as any other.

Now she remembered. She had crawled inside the tent at the roadblock despite Mandy's screams, and found complete darkness. But something had been moving in front of her and when she had called out, something big had slammed down hard mere inches from her leg. Deciding that this was a bit too dangerous to explore so casually, she had gathered her limbs before panic could overcome them and quickly crawled back out again. But outside, several hooded men had been waiting for her. Then it became really foggy. The last things she remembered before waking up in the chair was a hissing noise, Mandy's panicking stare from behind the roadblock signs and a terrible red face of anger in the distance.

She glanced at the booth again. No anger. Only a smile. Maybe that meant that she hadn't done anything wrong here yet, at least. She took a few deep breaths and decided to be brave and clever. She instantly felt more courageous when she thought about the Doctor. He wouldn't have wanted her to flail around like a scared kid when they were supposed to help other people.

The main screen on the front wall lit up when she leaned in closer, and at the same time a voice started talking from speakers above.

"Welcome to voting cubicle 343. Please leave this installation as you would wish to find it."

"Voting?" Amelia mumbled in confusion and stood up. "I don't want to vote! Why am I here, why didn't you put me in jail or something?"

"The United Kingdom recognizes the right to know for all our citizens. A presentation concerning the history of Starship UK will begin shortly. Please wait as your identity is being verified on our electoral roll."

One of the screens started typing up a name in bright yellow letters on the black background. Name: Amelia Jessica Pond, it said.

Amelia's eyebrows shot up and she kept protesting. "I'm too young to vote in things! How can you even have my name anyways? If this is the future, I should be long dead, right?"

"Age: twelve hundred and ninety-two."

She dropped her jaw and slowly slid back into the seat. That was just plain creepy, but she supposed it was true in a way. She could definitely use this if the Doctor or anyone tried to call her a kid again.

All the screens changed to show a graying man's kind face and Amelia swallowed and decided to just listen. The face in the booth was still smiling, after all.

"You are here, because you want to know the truth about the starship. And I'm talking to you because you are entitled to know. When this presentation has finished, you will have a choice." The man's eyes seemed to look into hers very solemnly through the glass screen. "You may either protest or forget."

She pulled her eyes away to look down at the buttons below the screens which she had barely noticed earlier. There were three of them, bright, old fashioned things with large letters printed on top. Protest, Record and Forget. A strange, uncomfortable feeling came over her.

"If you choose to protest," the man in the recording continued, "understand this. If just one percent of the population on this ship do likewise, the program will be discontinued with consequences for you all. If you instead choose to accept the situation, press the Forget button. All the information I'm about to give you will be erased from your memory."

Amelia winced. Erased memory? Something about that triggered her alerts. She wanted to be as far away from the Forget button as possible. To have one's memories taken away and forget a part of your life… What could be worse?

"You will then continue to enjoy the safety of Starship UK, unburdened by the knowledge of what has been done to save you."

She shifted in the chair, still as far from the Forget button as she could possibly put her hands. But at the same time, the voice sounded so grim and solemn that she wasn't really thrilled about what was to come either. Maybe she could look away?

But the film started.

She gasped as she fell forwards towards the horrible screens and felt something buzz under her hand, almost burning her palm. Looking down, she saw a red button glare back at her, the black word screaming into her face. Forget.

"What…?"

Nausea and a horribly numb feeling hit her at once, and she wasn't even sure that it was the effects of pressing the button that caused it. She had erased her memories. She had pressed the worst button and done it willingly, because she didn't remember standing up from the chair but now she had both feet on the ground and leaning against the screens. She had moved, but she didn't remember doing so.

She must have watched the movie, then. Something wet dropped down on her hand and she gasped again when she realized that it was a tear. She had been crying, and crying hard judging from the feeling of red eyes she was now finally sensing.

What could possibly have been so horrible to watch that she had chosen to willingly erase her own memories?

But the worst part was that the screens were still blinking. Message Waiting, they all said. She quickly glanced down at the big button in between the two vote options. Record. The screens shifted to display Play, and suddenly Amelia's own face displayed all over the wall. Red-eyed and in a state of despair.

"We gotta get out!" her own voice said as Amelia stared back in horror. "Go back to the box, don't try to help, get the Doctor away!" The face on the screen sobbed hard. "This is not what spaceships are supposed to be like. I don't want to be in space anymore."

The clip stopped and the screens turned to static as a creaking noise declared that a door was opened in the wall behind her.

"Amelia?" came the Doctor's worried voice.

He hurried up to her when she made no movement and crouched before her while he gently pushed her down into the chair. Then he noticed the empty look on her face and felt every dreadful thought he had had time to think on his way from the machine room to where the bleeping map pointed him, resurface. He put a hand on her shoulder and made her look into his eyes.

"What happened?"

She let out a remnant of a sob she still didn't know the reason behind. "I don't know."

"But why are you here? From what I gathered outside, these are some kind of official voting cubicles, but what for? And how did you even get here?"

"I trespassed," Amelia recalled thoughtfully. "They didn't like it."

"Who?"

"Some men. In robes."

A red velvet robe flashed by the Doctor's mind. The woman had known where Amelia had been taken. His brain started forming conspiracy theories again but he shoved them away mentally for now.

"Doctor, they erased my memory!" Amelia said, shuddering in the seat. "I was shown something on these screens but they erased it."

"Well that's rubbish," the Doctor said and stood up to scan a screen with the sonic. "Why show you something and then un-show it?"

"I think I chose to forget. But I don't know why, because I would never want to forget things like that."

He had noticed the buttons just as she said it and looked down at her with concern. It wasn't the only thing she had forgotten in her life. Whatever they showed her, it must have been really bad.

"Everyone chooses to forget," another voice came behind them.

Mandy was standing in the opening to the cubicle, watching them with uncertainty.

"Oh, brilliant, inside intel!" the Doctor said and walked up to the older girl. "Did you choose the forget button too?"

"I'm ten," Mandy replied as if the Doctor was stupid. "I'm too young. Anytime after you turn sixteen, they allow you to see the film and make your choice. And then once every five years. I don't really know why they let her vote," she added with a nod to the seven year old redhead.

Amelia crossed her arms in defiance, the mysterious tears finally gone. "I'll have you know that I'm 1292 years old."

The Doctor spun around and shot her an amused smile, which made her feel a bit less horrified at last.

"And every fifth year, everybody chooses to forget," the Doctor mused as he turned his attention back to the screens.

"How come you don't know about this?" Mandy asked, staying outside the cubicle. "Anybody knows this."

"I'm not anybody," the Doctor muttered. "Clearly. The movie won't even play for me," he chuckled.

"But it played for me and I'm not supposed to be here either," Amelia shot in.

"Well, there's a pretty big difference, isn't there. The computer recognizes you as human."

Mandy just blinked.

"He's a space elf!" Amelia clarified.

"Elf? Do you think I'm stupid? He looks human!"

"No," the Doctor felt the need to interrupt, though his focus still didn't shift from the screens which he kept sonicking and fiddling with. "You lot look Time Lord. We came first!"

"What's a Time Lord?"

At Amelia's question, he stopped and looked at her, unsure of what to say. It was just like the TARDIS question, this wasn't a good time for complicated explanations.

"It's… The real name of my species. Space elves. We're usually called Time Lords. Although, your name is a perfectly fine analogy, I'll give you that."

"And none of you live on the north pole, do you?" Amelia went on, surely. "So where do the other Time Lords live?"

This wasn't turning out the way he wanted it to. He could just mention Gallifrey, of course, let it be a fairy tale among all the others he spun around his own existence. But the image of Amy Pond in a doctor's coat came into his mind for some reason. This girl would go on to know so much about him. To start that off with lies just because she was a kid now wasn't fair. But despite that reasoning, he couldn't possibly explain what had happened to the Time Lords to little Amelia. At the very least not right here and now.

"Nowhere," he therefore said quietly, every curve of his deceivingly young face lit up by the eerie static screens. "There were more Time Lords, but there aren't… There's just me now."

Her reaction was as he expected. Not too much disbelief, rather just a lot of pity and a hint of shock.

"Long story, Amelia. It was a bad day. Bad stuff happened, and you know what? I'd love to forget it all. But I won't. Not ever."

Mandy rolled her eyes and looked like she'd better be going. She had only followed Amelia to the voting area because she was, in spite of all her angry words, a caring person who had been worried about where they took the knocked out girl. She had feared that she would go down below, and was too curious when she found that their destination had instead been the voting cubicles. But now she was really unsure of whether these two were really sane or not.

"Good," came Amelia's unexpected reply to the Doctor. "You shouldn't forget things you have seen."

She had no idea of what she was talking about, the Doctor thought. But he respected her resolve and smiled warmly at her at that.

"Quite right. Which is why we should continue our investigation from here."

"To find out what I forgot?"

"And why. But it might be scary. Dangerous. We might die."

"We might not."

Now the were both smiling, maniac grins that only adventurers with too much curiosity and courage for their own good could muster. The Doctor tried to take comfort in something he knew that he shouldn't: the fact that he had seen her older self alive and well. Time was heavily in flux, and he could regrettably feel it.

"Together?" he asked, one hand hovering over the last of the three buttons and the other taking Amelia's in hers firmly.

She tried to keep smiling, but when she saw what they were about to do, she only managed to grip his hand harder in response as she reached out her other one over the console. She glanced nervously at the face in the booth behind the Doctor. At some point, it had turned around and was not smiling anymore. Not a good sign. And in her message to herself, she had said to get the Doctor away…

But the Doctor put his hovering hand over hers and pressed them both down on the button. Protest.


End file.
